


Blame Me, I Will Wear It

by Figure_of_Dismay



Series: Yearlong [1]
Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s02e22 Tom Connolly (No. 11), F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gift Fic, Past Abuse, Series, Slow Burn, Survivor's Journey, cuddlecore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-04-05 19:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 43,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4191519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Figure_of_Dismay/pseuds/Figure_of_Dismay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post 2.22. For the LS Secret Hiatus. The first stage of Liz's journey with Red away from all she's known. Character centered 'On The Run' fic. Red and Liz learn how to live together, stay ahead of the law, and try to learn to communicate. This is as difficult as it sounds. Slow burn Lizzington. Past TK mentions. Part one of 'Yearlong' and now complete.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one (onward)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FallenAngel2210](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FallenAngel2210/gifts).



> all characters you recognize aren't mine, no infringement intended. Introspective 'on the run' fic with Red and Liz trying to learn how to live together and get to know each other. Part 1 of 3. For FallenAngel2210/Ashlene in the Lizzington Shippers Secret Hiatus fic swap, hope you like it!

The ride out from the city is long and cramped in the back of the panel van, but Liz isn’t keeping track of time. She sits quietly and then she dozes, consciously choosing to lean her head against Red’s inviting shoulder. She’s had everything so backwards for so long. She’d been so afraid of his imaginary indifference that she had been blind to the very real devotion he’d been offering her. 

She wonders if he thinks it was the recovered memory that changed her mind about him. Maybe it should have been but it wasn’t. It was standing in that ballroom, listening to Connolly gloat, listing to him threaten all her teammates, listening to him promise to capture Red and bring him in for public arrest, humiliation, death. She’d stood and pictured that future, she’d seen Red taken into custody too many times for it to be hard for her to do, the trial he’d face, the bloodthirsty glee of the media circus that would descend. She could tell that Connolly wouldn’t even allow Red the dignity of dying a free man, he would want the prestige of the takedown, the trial, the conviction. He would gorge himself on the power he stole from Red. He would take pleasure in Red’s degradation and suffering. He would make political hay from it, he would grow even more fat and glossy and untouchable as a result. 

She had pictured her own choking fear and humiliation in a courtroom. She had known that she couldn’t allow Connolly to bring that future into being. She had known that Red was hers, that as often as she grew furious with him, as often as she wanted to make him bleed, the thought of anyone else putting a finger on him to cause him pain was unacceptable, let alone the kind of cruel, public destruction Connolly had in mind. She’d looked at Connolly’s arrogant face, the proud smirk of a man assured of his victory and the powerlessness of anyone to oppose him. He wanted her fear. He wanted her to know he was going to take away the person most vital to her in the world and there was she could to to stop him. But Connolly had forgotten that he was just a man, who had threatened the very last thing she had left to lose, and that she was a woman with a gun. 

She had wanted to stop him smirking. She had stood with her weapon aimed and only considered not firing because Harold Cooper still wanted to save her. She was going down either way, she’d known that, so the took Connolly with her. She regrets disappointing Cooper, disappointing Red, but she doesn’t regret shooting to kill. She did what was necessary to protect them all. She just hopes she can stop Red from blaming himself after she tells him what happened. She can’t put it off forever.

Somehow she falls more deeply asleep, her body lulled by the drive, by Red’s warmth and nearness and protective strength. Her mind doesn’t settle, it just sinks into half-lucid rambling of worry and despairing. She wakes with a jolt, not quite processing that she’s slid down, her head pillowed in his lap, his arm heavy over her side to keep her safely in place. She’s struggling to sit up as Red tries to keep her from falling from the narrow bench seat.

“Wait, we have to go back,” she’s mumbling, half in her dream, “All my things, I left all my things, I need…”

“Sweetheart, we can’t go back. It’s not safe. We can buy new things for you...”

“No, my box of Sam’s things, the pictures… your music box… I don’t have any of it,” she says, eyes open at last, and she’s more awake now, tugging on the front of his jacket like it will anchor her. She knows going back isn’t an option, not for anything. She only had a few small remnants left of her old life, her old self. Now they are lost to her.

“I’m so sorry, Lizzie,” he says.

He gathers her closer and she expects more reassurances, more words of comfort, but there’s nothing, just the steady pressure of his arm around her waist and a gentle kiss pressed to the side of her head. There was nothing to say, nothing he can say that would ameliorate the present shattered and discarded state of her.

“They’re going to be tearing apart my motel room, touching everything, cataloguing everything,” she says, going taut. She’s shipwrecked in this barren future and there’s nothing she can do.

“But you are safe,” he says, “I don’t doubt knowing it helps just now, but you are safe and I will do everything possible to make sure it stays that way.”

It’s dark out. She has no idea where they are, though she assumes they headed South or West. She expected them to be headed to an airstrip to meet with his plane but if they haven’t made the switch yet they probably won’t.

“What happens next?” she asks when she’s able to speak past her panic.

“A car, and then another and another. Sometime very late tonight or tomorrow morning we should reach our safehouse. It’s off-grid, in the mountains of North Carolina but I think you’ll still find it comfortable. We can stop there a few days and come up with a plan,” he says, his voice just above a whisper, for her ears alone and she glances at the driver ahead of them with a sudden apprehension.

“He’s perfectly trustworthy,” Red assures her, even more quietly and if she weren’t in such a state she would probably have an opinion of some kind about his mouth so close that she can feel his warm breath on her ear, “But it’s a courtesy in my world not to burden your allies with secrets to keep when you don’t have call to include them.”

“Okay.” 

Her heart is beating so fast, not with the pleasure of being looked after but with animal fear. She wants to run, they are running but it doesn’t feel fast enough. She thinks he can feel the predator gaze on the back of her neck, cold and deathly and ready to snatch them up and make them suffer. What has she done, she wonders, how can she possibly live the rest of her life this way? And then she wonders, how has Red lived this way so long, how is it that he hasn’t broken or gone mad 

“Shouldn’t we get out of the country?” 

 “We’re more noticeable on the move. I do have some experience in this arena, remember,” he says, “Are you alright, Lizzie? You’re shaking.”

“I’m just cold,” she says, and she is, so cold her fingers are numb but that isn’t all of it. She feels like she’s dissolving, like she’s just a clattering assemblage of reactions and sensation, all of them wild and panicked, but that isn’t something she’s interested in talking about or paying attention to. 

Red starts stroking her back, like he trying to chafe some warmth back in her and then slower, to sooth. She wants it to help so badly, she want’s to gentle under his familiar hands and absorb comfort instead of resisting. She concentrates on the feeling. She tries.

“Slow breaths, Lizzie. Nothing’s going to happen to you tonight, nothing but a lot of travel. I’m afraid that you’re about to find out just how much tedium is involved in this lifestyle,” he says.

“Tedium? I guess that sounds better than the last few days,” she says, not really believing it possible that boredom or tediousness could have any place in fleeing for their lives.

Red hums an acknowledgement and slows his hand further still. “I can tell you’re skeptical but it’s true,” he says, “Boredom is one of the greatest risks to the budding fugitive. Carefulness takes time and patience, avoiding notice often takes considerable periods of isolation. It’s very easy to slip up under those conditions, not out of overconfidence, as you might suspect, but out of a need to make something happen or to have a real interaction with another person… Well. Those are worries for another day… but allow me to reassure you again, you are not alone in this.”

“Okay,” she says, and lays her head back on his shoulder — it’s cozier this time, more like an embrace as they hold onto each other in the rattling dark of the van — the icy tautness of panic just beginning to ebb, leaving her limp and sleepy once more. “I trust you. Took me a while but I do.”

**

They leave the van and it’s driver, after Red spoke to him briefly and shook his hand, and walk a block to an SUV with another diver standing by. After another while they repeat this procedure, Red explaining that they need to keep to back seats and tinted windows to avoid accidental appearances on traffic cameras or notice from other drivers stopped at intersections. 

Red is strangely forthcoming with the reasoning behind his set up and the details of his plan for the immediate future. By the third car she realizes that he’s trying to keep her mind occupied in the present, but also trying to teach her how to be a fugitive. They’re on the same side now, keeping his methods secret from her is no longer necessary, would probably even put them in more danger. She admitted at last to trusting him, but this narration of his is a bold statement of trust in her. She is being brought into the fold. 

She dozes on and off as they travel, not at all deeply or restfully but still, she nods off over and over into trance-like drowsing as her mind cuts out between trauma and boredom. They travel over freeways, and then up into mountainous country side over more modest highways, but always passing by cities rather than through. She loses track, sleeping the small hours of the morning away and coming awake again to Red’s hand on her arm and his voice telling her they’re changing vehicles again. 

It’s so late it’s early, with the first blue-grayness of dawn frosting the clouded sky, and as she steps away from the car the air is sweet with dew and the damp breathing greenness of country verdancy. They’re stopped on a narrow road, hilled and well wooded, and the hectic noise of the bird’s dawn chorus is beginning. She shuffles along by the overgrown verge on legs stiff from sitting and breaths the clean, chilly air as though it’s the first time she’s been out of the city in her life. Aside from the road, there are no visible signs of civilization. 

Red speaks to the driver in low tones she doesn’t try to make out and then comes to take her arm as the car they left turns and drives away. She feels a pang of apprehension like a hunger pang at their aloneness and vulnerability in the dark of morning in a strange wood. But Red’s guiding grip is steady and calm and he pulls out a small flashlight to shine at the road in front of their feet.

“I arranged for a vehicle to be left for us before we left the city. It should be just up ahead. If we were dropped off we would be without transport, which is not convenient for our purposes,” he says, his voice pitched soft so as not to carry on the moist, still air. 

“And you didn’t want anyone driving us to know the exact location,” she guesses.

“That too. Look, there we are, in the underbrush at the foot of the hill,” he says, aiming the flashlight ahead of them at a dark, sturdy old, dark Land Rover parked crookedly on the steep downward slope beside the road. She can see the tail light glint before he re-aims the light safely at the ground once more.

She wishes she’d worn differed shoes, an eon ago when she got dressed for protecting a senator, edging down that hill clotted with underbrush to the vehicle is going to be treacherous. She wishes she had clothes to change into because she already feels grubby with stress and travel and interrupted sleep. She worries that the heartiness of their transport bodes a long trek on rough roads. She’s more exhausted than she’s ever been in her life, it settles in her skin like a sunburn, and she doesn’t know how her body will withstand a long ride on dirt roads, she worries her mind might very well snap. 

“Aren’t you worried that the people who left the car for you know where we are?” she asks.

“I trust Kate Kaplan’s contacts as much as I trust anything in this world,” he says, and moves away from her to poke around the car. He finds the keys taped in the wheel well and turns back to her, “Do you want a hand, Lizzie?”

“I’m fine,” she says, and wades into the underbrush.

**

After that it’s a drive through mountain roads as spring dawn comes over the countryside, the thick green woods in full leaf gone luminous and cavern-like at once with rising sunlight and deep shade. If she had come here any other way or any other time, she could find it beautiful. She does find it beautiful, but it’s the beauty of a dream or a poem or a rich song in another language, she can’t connect herself with it and it has no meaning to her. 

They pass a small town or two and a handful of old-fashioned would-be small farms but mostly there are only trees and houses, and then even the houses peter out. By the time the morning is strong and bright, and her brain is buzzing with the white noise of long travel with few breaks, Red has turned off the narrow paved lane onto a long dirt track. He hasn’t spoken to her since they started off on their own, the long travel wearing on him, maybe. 

Or maybe he has no idea what to say. Everything is new and wrong and unprecedented and both of them are lost — even as Red navigates unmarked lanes without hesitation. She doesn’t know how to approach the silent man at her side, he feels almost a stranger to her after all she’s learned and all that’s changed between them. She doesn’t know face a day or week or a month alone with this man shut into a mountain cabin or on the run. As strange, as fraught and contentious as it’s always been for her relating to Red, she’s never been shy of him or been intimidated or hesitant around him. But now, for the first time, she feels an awkwardness creeping over her at the thought of being isolated and alone with Red for who knows how long. 

When she left with him the day before she she felt closer to him, more cherished and understood than she’d ever been, but now not even twelve hours later she is worried. She doesn’t doubt him, she doesn’t doubt his intentions, but she’s realized at last that she’s assessed him wrongly for so long, grasped onto a picture of his character that was so backwards and clung to it. Red was a different man in her eyes now, not the figure of coldness and calculation as she’d come to believe after she found out about the fulcrum and her connection to it. She’s more sure than ever the humanity, the warmth, the kindness she’d told herself she’d imagined in him are very real, as much a part of his makeup as the anger she’s seen in him and his relentless sense of duty. It’s a good discovery, it’s such a profound relief, and yet it makes her so very aware she hardly know him at all. She knows, now, the broad gestures of him, and a few of his more pronounced quirks, if they aren’t only part of his worldly persona, but she doesn’t know him as she would know a friend or even a close coworker. She doesn’t know him as a woman knows a man, as ordinary people from close up. What are they doing out here in the wilderness, how are they going to cope?

**

The safe house isn't nearly so small or primitive as she had feared. It’s big enough that it probably can’t even properly be called a cabin, though it’s shapes are peaked and rugged and clad in cedar shingles. It’s a pretty house tucked into a sheltered dish of mountainside, well disguised among tall pines and oak and leggy rhododendrons in gaudy red-pink bloom and any number of other trees and brush that weren’t immediately familiar to her. Pollen floats like gold dust in the patches of sun but the air is cool, cold and moist with the piquant tang of green, growing things and earthy leaf mold. 

She stands and looks and waits for the sensation of constant motion to subside in her, bolstered by the solidity of the car door at her back where she leans. Red is waking the house, as he says, getting the power on and checking that all is well and undisturbed and whatever else is necessary in a place like this. There is a well and running water he assures her, and a generators to supplement the solar panel system. They won’t be roughing it, he has assured her. 

Eventually he comes back out on the front porch, looking at her with a reassuring smile but even from that distance she can tell it’s a gesture to mask his worry. He’s shed his coat and rolled up his sleeves and there’s leaf detritus still stuck to one of his knees — from getting the generator on she guesses — and she can tell he still holds himself a little carefully on his right side. But suddenly there seems to be a difference in him, a looseness, a sharp-eyed artlessness, as though the cultured man about town has been put aside as unnecessary for the present. 

She goes to join him, stepping from the brightness of the morning to the strong shade of the deep porch. And then, following the shape of Red’s shoulders more than any real sense of her surroundings, into the house for what is likely supposed to be a tour. She gets a vague sense of a cozy, modern timber framed house trying to look rustic. Inside the front door is an enormous open room with a kitchen tucked behind a long stairway to a loft and hallways leading off at either side of the kitchen. She stops him after a quick glance around, the solid, level floor feeling as unsteady as a ship’s deck in her tiredness and disorientation. 

“I think I need to lie down for a while,” she says.

“Of course,” Red says and puts a gently guiding hand on her back as he’d done the day before, leading her down one of the very dark hallways. He opens a door for her into a large, dim bedroom — she wonders with a swallowed laugh if he means to tuck her into bed, too — but to her dismay the mattress on the big bedstead is bare and Red draws up short beside her. 

“Right. Of course, I forgot. Make yourself at home and I’ll get the linens,” he says and leaves her alone again.

There are windows on two of the walls with their heavy curtains drawn shut and she goes immediately to open them. First the thick, grey drapes that give off a little puff of dust as she shoves them aside, and then swings open the casements as well, dispelling the mustiness of disused room with a waft of sweetness. It’s an act of rebellion against the instinct to hide in the dark, she will breath fresh air, she will sleep with the sun on her face, she won’t make a tomb of this expensively built vacation home belonging to god knew who, she won’t wallow in fear. 

She can’t, anyway, fear takes energy and she had none. Instead she leans on the window sill with her elbows and admires the shaggy bit of meadow-like yard between her room and the woods, dappled and dazzling as a postage-stamp patch of golden sea. 

“You might want to pull down the screens before you settle in,” Red says, startling her, silent as a cat she thinks to herself as she turns to see him in the doorway, “Or you’ll be eaten alive by mosquitos, hard winter this year or no.”

She can’t help smiling at the sight of Red loaded down with an armload pillows and blankets. “I can do it myself, if you just leave that stuff on the bed,” she says.

“You think I’ve never made up a bed, Lizzie?” he teases, raising an eyebrow at her.

“Sure, but aren’t you supposed to still be recovering from… you know,” she says, skating delicately around the memory of the shooting, “That was only a few weeks ago.”

“I’m hardly an invalid,” he says and dumps all the bedding on the big padded bench at the foot of the bed.

“And I’m hardly incapable, either,” she counters, her voice getting harder in spite of herself.

“And if you’re angling for a fight, Lizzie I’m not going to give you one, certainly not over bed linens,” Red says lightly, “Come on, we’ll both pitch in.”

So, in the softly spilling sunlight and the cool breeze wafting in, they work together to make up her bed. Red makes crisp, perfect hospital corners with the bottom sheet, with a deftness she truly is surprised by — he really is an ordinary man who can do ordinary things. They work wordlessly until, in a moment of remove, she scrutinized the mental image of herself and Raymond Reddington, international criminal extraordinaire, as they are, stretching a pale cambric sheet across her bed and making it billow like a bellied sail before laying it down smooth, in concert like it was a solemn operation, and realizes it’s truly bizarre. Then she starts giggling helplessly, giddy with relieved nerves and a sudden profound sense that her her life hadn’t so much crumbled into ruination but instead tipped over sideways into the deeply absurd. 

“Lizzie?” Red asks, sounding concerned as she continues to pat the silk-smooth sheet free of non-existent wrinkles with a kind of fondness, as though it’s responsible for her levity, and laughing to herself.

She shakes her head and looks at him, and he looks so handsome and familiar and adorably confused that she laughs again, fondly. “You and I, doing this… It’s just that this is nothing like anything I pictured,” she says at last, “Like nothing I ever pictured, my whole life.”

Red nods, his face going soft and warm, “I know what you mean, Lizzie,” he says.


	2. two (temporary)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the house in the mountains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little earlier than advertised, but it was done and so i didn't want to let it sit waiting. Depending on how the last part goes, it may need to be split for length. If so, look out for part 3 at the end of the weekend and if not part 3 should be up middle of next week. Please let me know if you're still enjoying this little fic!

It’s quiet, it’s very very quiet the first few days. Being cut off from everything familiar, having no cell phone — no phone at all besides a satellite phone for emergencies, and she’s already learned the new number— no internet, no cable, no job, no files to work on, is shock to her system. It’s not necessarily a bad shock, given how she’d felt herself bowing farther and farther under the stress of the last year and a half, to the point where she was never quite sure if she had already snapped. But the suddenness of it is difficult. She has the lingering sensation that there are obligations hanging over head and going unfulfilled, days of work missed with no leave, emails going unanswered, reports going undone and unfiled. They were obligations that no longer pertained to her, never would again. That life was utterly gone from her now, but she still feels the responsibilities of it nagging at her as though she is about to step back into it at any minute.

It’s worst the second day, as Red had left her alone to go into the nearest town for supplies. There were dry goods in the pantry when they arrived but they needed fresh food as well, and toiletries, and Red said his contact in town would have received the suitcases of clothes for them both that he’d arranged to be sent after them when the escape protocol was put into motion. Red’s other mission was to send out feelers via the same contact to see how much of his network remained in place and loyal to him in the face of pressure from the Cabal. 

All in all he’d been gone all day, leaving Liz to stew alone with her worry that he would be caught the second he stepped out of the Land Rover in town and her sense that there were a thousand things which she ought to be doing but wasn’t and couldn’t. She’d paced the house and opened windows and wiped down dusty counters and poked at the bookshelves and peered in cupboards until she was left with the realization that she had no idea how to fill her time without her job. She’d worked year round on her education and her career since she was a teenager, and aside from a few romantic weekend getaways with the very small number men she’d been involved with long enough to consider such a thing. This was nothing like that, not even slightly.

Still she'd been more relieved about Red's return late that night than could be accounted for by the fresh supplies and lack of capture. She was already more dependent on his company than she had known. Her reality made just a hair more sense with him there, and that's as far as she could consider.

She had tried to talk to Red about her pressing sense of shirked duties when he noticed her increasing agitation, but he didn’t have any helpful, surreal anecdotes to point her on her way. He had admitted that his own first flight from the law was so frantic and so confused with grief for his lost family that he didn’t clearly remember the first several months. 

“When I wasn’t on the move or trying to find old contacts that would still help me,” he’d told her quietly, not looking at her but off away at the abstracted middle distance of the past, “I was in a wretched state. I remember… a lot of drinking, a few rash altercations. I hadn’t… decided yet if I meant to survive, or if I meant for them to catch up with me and be done with it.”

“What made you choose to keep fighting?” she had asked, had hoped that she’d be able to latch onto a similar reason, draw a sense of purpose from his — learn at least that was possible at least to decide to put such traumas in the past and have them stay there.

“I don’t think I did choose, in the end,” he’d said, and she’d subsided a little in disappointment, “I just found that I was. I came very close to being caught, and I found that instead of surrendering I was still fighting. I even found that I was best against impossible odds. That’s when I struck a deal with the Cabal through Alan Fitch, and I did it with the kind of bluff that never should have worked and a plan that fell into place in many ways before I consciously decided to try… Of course it only worked because it was the kind of bluff that they believed no one would ever make if they didn’t have the goods to back it up. It was the plan of an insane man, you should know that Lizzie, for all that it kept you and I both protected for some twenty-odd years. It may take a similar bolt of madness to get back to a place of equal security, and I can’t see what it is yet.”

“We have time, don’t we?” she’d asked, not sure if she was reassuring him or wishing to be reassured herself.

“Yes, Lizzie, we have time. In fact I believe we may be safe here for quite a while,” he assured her, meeting her eyes to show he was serious. “I made a nuisance of myself by releasing as much damaging information as I did to the press. While the Cabal will want to strike at me, they will also want to shift the focus of the public onto something else as quickly as possible. If we are buried deep in hiding it’s almost as good to them as being buried underground, and either way they will be busy shoring themselves up for at least long enough for us to regroup.”

“That’s just your guess, though,” she’d said, “You can’t know for sure what they’re planning.”

“It’s an educated guess,” he’d said, and stroked her arm, he’d begun to do that now, reaching out to comfort her, and she’d begin doing the same. It was strange, perhaps, but it felt necessary to keep each other calm and sane in the wilds of their strange new future.

She’d accepted that he knew what he was talking about when it came to the Cabal and put it from her mind, no closer to understanding how to let go of her old life than before. It would take time, she had guessed, and making herself accept that what was gone was gone.

**

It isn’t quiet in the physical sense though, the mountain around them is riotous with the rabble rousing of spring bird life and the soughing of changeable breezes rising and falling as the days wore on. She’d not used to the sounds of nature around her, not anymore. She’d grown up on the fuzzy boundary between country suburbs but then lived in cities her entire adult life, first New York, then Baltimore, then DC. She knows how to tune out the sounds of cars and sirens but not how to sleep through the hectic insistence of the dawn chorus. 

The third night, she wakes to a sound like a scream echoing down the hillside above them and she’s out of bed on shaking legs before she can even process what she’s heard but absolutely certain they were in some way under attack. She hurries down the hall, planning to go wake Red up in the loft and prepare for whatever was about to happen. 

He's not up in bed though, but sitting in the great room, reading by the light of the fire, looking perfectly at ease. He looks up at her, surprised, and she goes all uncertain, aware she's in night clothes, aware she's may have only had a dream.

"I thought I heard something," she says.

He looks thoughtful for a second, scanning his memory, then, "I heard a mountain lion call earlier, very far away. There's are still some around in this region, but not many. I'm sure she had no interest in us."

"I'd heard that, I think... I just didn't connect it with... It sounded human, it sounded like... Let's just say it went with my dream," she says. 

"Oh, Lizzie, I'm sorry," he says, putting the book aside and patting the space beside him on the couch. 

“You should stop apologizing, Red. It’s going to get very old,” she says darkly but comes around to plop heavily into the spot beside him feeling a little calmer in the warmth from the hearth. She pulls the folded throw from behind her and shuffles it around her shoulders, not because she’s cold but for the additional sense of protection it gives.

“I genuinely regret that you are hurting, I regret the immense part I’ve played to bring us to this point,” he says, “It would be wrong not to apologize. I have failed you, in so many ways.There’s no way I can ever make it up to you.”

“I did this, Red. I put us here. You don’t get to assume all the culpability here,” she says, sharp and hard, not wanting to have this argument but not willing to let Red keep wallowing in guilt the way he seemed to want to. “You can’t deny we wouldn’t have pissed off the Alliance this much if I hadn’t been more interested in power games than understanding what was going on. I thought you were exaggerating, I really thought you were. Do you even realize what kind of B movie pulp all this ‘cabal’ and ‘fulcrum’ conspiracy stuff sounds like?”

“It’s occurred to me in retrospect, yes, that you, not having lived with this scenario for the last twenty years, might not have been able to see the magnitude of the situation no matter what I said to explain it,” he says slowly, with some of the wry, gallows humour she’s relieved to hear from him again.

“I guess I know for the future that when you say, in that quiet tone of voice you use for absolutely everything, ‘this is important and dangerous’ what you actually mean is ‘there is an apocalyptic shit storm headed our way,’” she says, “But I’ve been going over it and, from the point where I didn’t give you that fulcrum key in time, I don’t know what either of us could have done differently. It all just seemed to… snowball.”

“You can’t blame yourself for this,” he insists.

“I can,” she says, “I really can. You can’t honestly say I shouldn’t have done anything differently the last few months.”

Red sighs heavily beside her but doesn’t respond and she can’t bring herself to look at him. She doesn’t want to argue. She doesn’t want to talk about it. But she doesn’t want him casting himself as the villain here, over and over. She’d believed it so readily because he’d believed it, but she’d finally realized once and for all that it wasn’t true, and now when he said these things, they stung her just as deeply as though he’d accused her instead of himself.

“Look, I’ll admit that you tried in so many misguided ways to protect me that I had no chance of understanding what was going on, if you’ll admit that I screwed up royally on all my major decisions the last six months,” she says, trying to make it sound like she’s joking, like she’s finding some morbid humor in all this. She’s not, but it’s better than picking a fight at two in the morning over something they seem destined never to agree on and can never undo.

“Just because you regret something now, doesn’t mean you could have made a different decision at the time, with the information you had,” he says, turning to face her but she still doesn’t look away from the tidy little fire in the grate, small and safe and well contained the way she’s figure out they both like it, “You can’t start second guessing yourself, Lizzie, if you start down that road… It can be paralyzing. And in a matter of days you’re going to need to make a number of important decisions about your future, and sabotaging yourself with self-doubt certainly won’t help you there.”

“Stop it,” she says, quiet and hurt and frustrated, tucking her legs up under her blanket, “Just stop. You won’t give an inch, will you? It doesn’t matter what I say you just won’t give it up. First you were so sure you could help me, that you were right. Now you’re so sure that you’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me and it doesn’t matter what i say about that either,” she stops there, feeling her heart beating on the back of her tongue. She’s not ready to finish that thought, she’s not willing to ask him that’s been pressing on her teeth whenever she thinks of it, starting from when she first thought about the implications about his lecture on the long road of guilt and reparations as they peered down on Ames’ daughter. Is he only doing this out of guilt? Is he only doing this, caring for her, helping her out of an overgrown sense of obligation and regret?

She doesn’t want to know if he is. She doesn’t. She needs to know, and probably some day soon, but she needs Red too much now to find out whether it’s true. She needs his help, she needs whatever answers he still has, she needs him as, strangely, her last remaining link to her old life, but mostly she needs him because he’s the person who understands her most of anyone she’s ever met. Aside from his glaring blind spot when it comes to his understanding of his own nature, she trusts his judgement. She trusts him. It’s been like waking from a long fever dream, realizing that she could and should, and she’s not willing to see their hard-won partnership invalidated again. Not now, not yet.

“Stop what, Lizzie?” he asks, quiet and tired, “Trying to help you? Trying to comfort you? Trying to share with you what I’ve learn walking this path for the greater portion of my adult life? What specifically do you find objectionable?”

“You _know_ what I’m talking about. It’s not what you’re saying. It’s not all your fault, but you just won’t listen to me,” she says, and she knows her voice sounds pleading and strangled.

“I am listening to you, Elizabeth. I just don’t agree,” he says gently, and he sounds so resigned that it makes her furious.

“Bully for you then. I’m going back to bed,” she says, sharp and petulant, and rises, shedding the blanket with a quick shrug that goes wrong when her arms get tangled in the the soft, knitted wool. 

“Lizzie, wait,” he says, sounding hurt now, his voice boyish, urgent.

She doesn’t wait, though, she rushes from the room with it’s orange and brown warmth of firelight back to the cold, clammy darkness of her bed. Her heart is beating so hard. She feels silly for wanting to sit with him, for thinking she could comfort him as well as he could comfort her. She doesn’t understand why she can never be patient and forgiving the way he can.

She folds herself into a ball under her covers, listening through her still-open for the sounds of Red shifting and sighing out in the sitting room. She waits and waits for the sound of his quiet footfalls as he climbs the stairs to the loft or shuffles around in his room that is directly above hers as far as she can tell, but they never come. She drifts back to sleep some time around dawn, but near as she can tell, he sits up all night alone. She sleeps tucked protectively around the leaden pang that settles behind her ribs.

**

They spend a week in the pretty mountain house, and it’s extensive woodland grounds.

She walks most mornings when the dew still spangles the grass and underbrush, clambering up and down hills, trying to keep her body active. She’s used to going running most days, back in the city, but running the deer trails or the dirt road holds no appeal to her and though Red’s plan accounted for a suitcase full of new clothes for her that all basically fit, it didn’t include athletic shoes for her. 

The fresh air helps to lift the fog that keeps trying to settle in, the distractedness and worry. It wears her out enough that she is still sleeping, despite constantly troubling dreams and mounting and ebbing tension between her and Red. She spends enough time wandering in the woods that she doesn’t actually know what Red does to fill up most of his daylight hours. She wonders if he thinks she’s avoiding him. She isn’t, she’s only avoiding the slow-brewing argument about which of them is more at fault for getting them sunk in this mess. She’d scared herself off, the night they argued, seeing how much it mattered to her, and and how much Red was set in his opinion of himself.

It made her think of that night after fishing Red out of the clutches of the King family, when he’d seemed so angry to her, so angry with her for wanting to help him that he could barely speak. She’d been so panicked at thought of losing him, and all she wanted as she’d searched for him in the scrum of agents and company SUVs was to see him, to be comforted that he was unharmed and unaffected by his close brush with death. She’d heard her name fall from his lips when he thought it was the end, and she’d thought he’d at least be glad to see her — she’d even pictured him being proud of her. But it hadn’t been like that at all. He’d been so cold and she’d cried quietly all the way home, and he hadn’t said a word, like he was punishing her for thinking he was worth saving.

She never wanted a repeat of that night, the helplessness of loving him so much — and she’d accepted that that’s what she felt for Red, not any kind of love she’d known before but it was too gnawing and persistent and expansive to be anything else — in the face of his steadfast refusal. So she kept her distance while she could in hope that both of them might relax. The impossible had happened to her before after all.

Their days passed quietly. Red did the cooking, out of natural skill and a healthy self-preservation, not complicated meals given their limited supplies and the small kitchen, but good and filling. She insisted on doing the dishes, saying it was only fair, but Red usually kept her company, leaning against the counter and telling her strange stories about all sorts of things, people he’d met in these mountains, the man whose house they were staying in — Red had apparently won the use of it in some kind of bet over an art heist in a story she hadn’t entirely followed, but then again, wasn’t sure if she believed. 

She told him one night that he was a much better cook than Tom had ever been, but had regretted it instantly. Red tried to tell her that it was alright, that Tom had been three years of her life and that experience wouldn’t just go away, but he didn’t know that she’d spent her last night before going on the run with that man, whatever he chose to call himself, and she’d felt sick with regret ever since. Before she’d made that thoughtless comparison, she’d managed to keep from raising his spectre and her slip felt like a bigger kind of failure.

Other than that, they talked of nothing with much substance. It was an artificial calm and they felt it, but she was glad to let it stand for as long as possible.

*

Finally, the first grey, sodden, blustery day since they’d gone up the mountain, Red announces that he’s heading back into the nearest town to check back in with his contact. He’s sure his network will have reported back by now, and the passports, money and documentation will have come in. He’s going to go make the rendezvous then she’s going to actually make some decisions about what she wants to do next. 

She wants to go with him, in case there is any trouble. Meeting with the contact a second time seemed like a perfect opportunity for an ambush if the person he was meeting had sold him out. And she doesn’t like the idea of being left protectively behind, like a child or a delicate wife. But Red’s unmovable, she’s too recognizable and they can’t risk her being spotted in town.

“Either we can trust her or we can’t,” he says as he shrugs into his blue anorak and settles his hat on his head, “But we won’t get very far without the papers and the money and some kind of working network, so I have to take this chance. But I’m sure she’s trustworthy, Lizzie, it’s going to be fine.”

She has to has to clench her jaw to keep from asking about this ‘she’ of his. If she’s anything like Madeline Pratt, jealous and vindictive. But Liz knows that no matter what risks Red’s willing to take when he’s on his own, he wouldn’t play games when it comes to her safety. She watches him go with no further comment.

She spends the day sitting on the couch, the steady rain rattling on the resonant tin roof like a timpanic sound track, with a little notebook balanced on her knee. She had found it in a drawer in the kitchen, probably it was meant for grocery lists, but she writes out the worst case scenarios she can think of for that could happen to her in the near future. This doesn’t alarm her, it’s an interesting mental exercise, and some of the possibilities seem so far fetched that they help put her current situation into perspective. 

Then she makes a list of things that she actually wants to have happen, and tries to decide if any of these seem any more likely than the other. This is the list that makes her mouth go dry and her blood mentholate with adrenaline. It’s difficult to even think ahead, to hope that there is anything other than rabbiting ahead of the hunt in this aimless manner for the rest of a short, uncertain life. To hope for anything other feels like inviting danger. But there are a few things she still wishes for in her life. No matter how hard she tries to be, she’s not surprised at how many of these involve Red.

She gives up with nothing decided and instead tries to work off some nervous energy to try and do something to return the favor for all the breakfasts and dinners Red has cooked the last week. She can’t cook worth a damn, she’d known that since before Tom started teasing her about it. She gets flummoxed by seasoning, and every cut of meat she’s ever tried to serve has ended up overcooked out of paranoia of undercooking it. However, she’s been equal to baking cookies since she was twelve and she’d found a bag of chocolate chips while poking around in the cupboards the first day Red left her alone here. It’s a tiny, juvenile gesture in the face of decades of protection and months of risking his life and now abandoning his work to help her escape, but it’s the best she can swing while isolated in the wilderness like this.

By the time the time the daylight peters away to a blue, hazy glow in the big windows and she starts going around turning on lights, the whole house smells of butter and sugar and vanilla. She’s made a phenomenal mess, but there are two baking sheets of perfectly edible, in fact quite good, cookies — she’d tried a few to make sure — from a seemingly unused copy Joy Of Cooking. It’s sweet and soothing and familiar, it makes her think of lazy autumn afternoons when she was a kid, playing with her cousins while Aunt June cooked and baked downstairs, nostalgic and safe with the gentle sting of poignancy for things long gone.

When she was old enough to take the bus and be at home alone for the few hours between when school let out and her dad came home, she learned how to look after herself, make pasta or cookies or cocoa and grilled cheese, and it had been comforting to be able to feed herself and make the house smell friendly and warm from cooking. It wasn’t that she would have gone hungry if she hadn’t learned, it was that she needed the sense that she could stand on her own if she had to. There had always been a certain fragility to her life, more than the usual sense of mortality that all humans held. 

Growing up, her dad had tried to protect her but she wasn’t very old when she realized that the precautions she was to take were different than those of the other kids from school. She knew they were trying to avoid notice from some kind of outside force, and that there were some things that she just wasn’t to ask about, ever. That she needed to be strong and capable and able to look after herself in a pinch, because there was always the not so distant possibility that some unknown bad thing might happen.

In some ways her present situation isn’t so far removed from the uncertainty she’d always known. But now she knew who the enemies were, now she knew how powerful and far reaching they were, and now she had blood on her hands to make a specific target not just an unwitting accessory. It’s different knowing the specifics. It’s different knowing what she’s done.

She’s done cleaning up and trying to decide if she should fight her nerves and start a fire in the hearth to keep off the growing chill — the off grid electrical system is powerful enough for lights, well pump and water heater and modest refrigerator but not sufficient for central heat apparently — when she hears a vehicle coming up the road. She thinks it’s Red, but she still hurries to turn off the main lights and get her gun and waits just beside the front window until she can see the now-familiar boxy shape of their borrowed car pulling up. She’s managed to ignore all day how worried she’d been, mostly, but now she’s so relieved she has to lean hard against the wall beside the window, staring blankly at the indigo glow of deep twilight and the faint image of her own startled face reflected on the glass.

Red comes in shaking the rain from his hat but unperturbed by the darkened house, and she surprises them both by rushing up to him, fussing over him. She wants to clutch at him or for him to gather her close for comfort against the bleak future that suddenly looms close again, but she holds herself back at the last moment. She takes his coat and hat instead and hangs them on the hooks by the door and returns to study his face, trying to read what kind of luck he’s had in his eyes.

“Lizzie,” he says, catching her arms in a gentle grip, “Look at you. Have you been that worried?”

She shrugs uncertainly, feeling foolish.

“I’m sorry, I should have called you. Everything went perfectly to plan,” he says, warm and obviously in a good mood. He leads her around to the sitting area and turns on a lamp so that they can see each other clearly, casting the room in soft amber light and turning the windows night-black and opaque. “We have passports, we have options, we have a loyal network. Lizzie, I admit, I’m almost as surprised as you are but we may yet prevail.”

Red grins at her and she grins back, and discovers that they’re sitting and clutching each other’s hands though she can’t remember who reached out to whom. She finds she’s not the least inclined to take her hand back, that she doesn’t grow awkward or embarrassed.

“It smells like a bakery in here,” he says, surprising her. 

She’d forgotten. “There’s a reason for that,” she says dryly, “I got bored out of my mind and made cookies.”

“Well, they smell wonderful. You’ve been underselling your abilities, Lizzie, I was never sure I believed all that, ‘you don’t want me helping out I’m sure I’d poison us’ business,” Red says, teasing.

“Oh, no, believe me. It’s basically just cookies and spaghetti I can make, and that’s not enough to live on. Everything else is a complete disaster,” she says, laughing. 

She’s so relieved. It doesn’t even matter what they’re talking about, she’s not entirely paying attention, it’s the way a weight seems lifted off Red and his confidence gives her hope.

“You’ve focused on other things in your life,” he says, very soft, gone all sincere, and her eyes fall to the soft smile on his lips, “You’ve accomplished so much. Nothing that’s happened recently can invalidate that. I was thinking, on the drive back here, about how you talk about all these responsibilities you still feel pressing on you. You must have have faced so much immense pressure to prove yourself, and it’s hard to stop seeking that acceptance and validation. But maybe you could try to remember that even if that chapter is over now, no one can take that experience away. You’re still the same person.”

“Am I? It’s hard to tell. Remembering… what I have. Realizing I had so much completely backwards. Realizing that I would— that I will kill to protect those I… care about. I’m not sure anymore,” she says, pulling her hands back from his to fidget them nervously in her lap. 

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the kind of life I’ve led, it’s that no matter how hard you try, you can’t get away from who you are,” Red says, and then after a pause, a hesitance that makes her worry, he asks the question she’s been dreading, “Lizzie, why _did_ you shoot Tom Connolly?”

“I—“ she freezes, takes a deep breath. She wants to tell him, she wants him know how desperately she cares for him, how deeply she’d feared for him. But the crushing guilt on his back has just begun to lift, and she needs him to be hopeful and confident, she needs him to be her steady guide through this. “I’m not ready to talk about that,” she says instead.

“Of course, Lizzie,” he says, reaching out to stroke her hand in a brief, fluttering gesture of reassurance, “I’ll go and bring in the documents from the car. You should get familiar with your aliases.”

She sits and waits as Red puts on his coat and goes out to the car and back, buying them some time to move away from the awkward subject of her guilt, her silence. She gazes around at the big stone hearth, and the warmly lit, gleaming little kitchen, and the soft blanket draped over the arm of the couch that she’d seen Red curled up under one morning when she’d been up before him and seen that he’d slept downstairs again. She realized that she’d become comfortable here, felt the scenery around her go from lovely and foreign to personable and familiar in just a few days, and also realized that they were going to move on soon. She wondered if this was how Red always felt, like he was just beginning to own a place when it came time to pull up stakes and move on. Perhaps that’s why he moved so often, not just for safety but so as not to get too attached, not to feel the pull of familiarity. 

There would be other places soon, she knows, several, perhaps dozens. But this was the first, her first after, the first shared with Red. She tries to fix it in her mind.


	3. three (thesis)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> on the road again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the delay in updating. there's no adequate excuse, but between some inside fandom drama, some outside fandom drama I got distracted for a while. That and the absolute perfusion of 'on the run' fics started confusing me about what direction i really want to go with this. I've already started the next chapter, and I believe there will be one more after that. My goal is not to write an epic, but still to tell a complete story. I'm going to push hard and get this done before the fall premier, i promise you that much!

Liz studies the pictures on her new passports and recuts the bangs she's just spent more than a year growing out, straight and heavy across her forehead. She's not sure it's an especially flattering look. She thinks it makes her look too young, girlish and sweet, she's always balked at the incongruity of her face and how she feels she truly is. She's always looked young for her age, pretty, sweet, and it's always undercut her in her chosen career. She's had to try even harder to be tough and ungiving to be taken seriously so she's often tried to avoid sweet and girlish, aiming instead for polished and professional or plain and no-nonsense. Still, it's a markedly different look than the picture they used in the news. After she uses the box of lightening hair color Red brought her, she'll match the dark, ruddy-blonde haired woman on her documentation.

She wonders if Red chose her new look and what it means if he had. Somehow she doesn't think that it means that he wants her looking young and girlish. His eyes linger on her most when she's all dressed up, hair and makeup and fancy clothes for the dangerous, elegant evenings out he takes her on. His eyes are drawn to her red lipstick he stares the most when she wears her hair swept back — she's known this for a long time even though she's pretended she hadn't noticed. So no, she doesn't think he's voting for the school girl look. It disguises her face though, and that's the point.

She stands a long time in the small bathroom with the thick dye soaking into her hair and making her scalp itch and the small noise of the extractor fan making her ears buzz, feeling a displaced sense of curiosity at what she will look like after her transformation. If she will feel more confidant or less, more connection to her reflection or more sense that her face was a trick - so pretty but so cold and selfish, as one spurned love had told her. She knew it was ridiculous, but it had stuck in her mind. There was a reason she'd turned down Nick's proposal, though it hadn't ever been as clear as when she saw his cold fury after she'd told him no.

Red knocks on the door a couple times, checking on her, telling her she needn't hide away the whole time since she was certainly careful enough not to drip dye in unfortunate places, but she turned him down. She doesn't feel comfortable letting Red see her in only a towel and a slather of off-colored foam on her hair. No matter how many other strange states he'd seen her in, that seems a step or two too far. She's doubled the time listed on the back of the box, because she knows from teenage experience that her dark hair is stubborn and unresponsive, so she's forced into stillness with a wet, uncomfortable head for a long time, trying not to panic with so much time on her hands to realize they're mere hours away from heading back out into the wide and dangerous world and on the run.

She scrutinizes her appearance after drying her hair and decides it's not so different, and also that it won't fool anyone who knows her, but it's likely enough to deflect passing glances. She smells of chemicals and floral scent from the hair dye and she's going to go put on more of the new clothes from the suitcase Red brought her — all of which are neutral and casual but far better quality than she could afford to buy for herself, with not a department store brand or synthetic fiber in sight among them. She really doesn't want to think about how much he's spent on her new wardrobe. It would feel a bit like playing dress-up, only she can't forget the reasons why they're doing this long enough to enjoy it.

She's learned her new signatures, though she's not sure when she'll have cause to use them. Red takes care of the arrangements and the money, or he has so far and she doesn't expect that to change so early in their journey. Of course the situations she can't picture are the reasons she has to be prepared.

They're going north and west, over land by car because a commercial travel is too much of a risk. They're headed to Jackson Hole, where an old contact of Red's has retired young to a palatial lodge and a stake in a resort, and keeps a private jet. Red has intimated that this friend, Calhoun Moss, has made his ultra-rich status by far-less-than-legal means and keeps his own grudge against the Alliance for their chokehold on top-level power brokering in the West. Moss sounded, by Red's description, eager to help them in any way he could, if only because it would give him a chance to thumb his nose at the great and powerful who had thwarted him in the past.

"But do you actually trust him?" she'd asked Red, not terribly reassured by the endorsement he'd given Moss.

"I trust him not to give us up to the authorities and get us safely out of the country. If and when he gets investigated for any number of his myriad sins, I'm sure he'll try to use everything he knows about us to save himself, but he won't know enough to make any difference to us," Red had assured her, and she'd been satisfied with that.

The way he had spoken of Moss with no small measure of contempt had given her pause. She wasn't sure how Red managed to lead a life on friendly terms with so many people he very clearly didn't like, didn't trust and didn't respect — and seemingly didn't want her near if they'd had the choice. How did he put aside his distaste long enough to do business with them? She'd seen him with these people, starting with Wu Jing and so many others with, the seamless bluff nonchalance he put on for them, like a switch being switched, and she'd seen him deflate afterwards, alone with her again with the near-manic light in his eyes being replaced with a hollowness, a gravity. She honestly has no idea how he lives this way, and no idea if she will be willing or able to do the same.

So there is a plan to work from and she's sorry to be leaving their safe-haven in the mountain, but she's glad they're going to be on their way out of the country. It's likely an illusion that being out of the States will put them out of the reach of the Alliance, but they're only a few state borders away from DC, which seems to be the seat of power for their little coalition as well as the government, and it feels to Liz like they're still far, far too close for comfort.

She tries not to think about the fact that she and Red will be on the move for days in close quarters and will have no opportunity to retreat to their separate corners to head off any one of the many major arguments that seem to wait always just below the surface. She doesn't really sleep the last night in the sweet, soft bed Red helped her to make up. Instead, she thinks and plots and worries and dozes until Red knocks on her door in the morning and calls to her that it's time for breakfast and then they had better start wiping the place down and get on the road.

*

Before they set out Red sits down across from her at the little dining table, after the breakfast dishes are washed and put away for the last time, and shows her his new batch passports and IDs. The last names match her new IDs. She doesn't say anything and he doesn't say anything, and they both try not to think about the open question that's been hanging over their heads since they met, nearly two years back. Red watches her with troubled, wary eyes as though he's trying to wait out an outburst from her that hasn't come.

"We have to travel as something unobtrusive, something common and ordinary," he says at last, supporting arguments for a question he hasn't yet asked, although she can feel it in the air around them just the same as if he had, and her face grows hot as he speaks, "It doesn't need to include a complex backstory and play acting, but we do need an easy answer ready."

"Yes, I agree," she says and fights to meet his eyes with calm in the face of an overwhelming urge to fidget and look away. They're in this together. The need to face it like adults instead of with the adolescent embarrassment and avoidance with which they've been acting for so long.

Red looks a little flushed too, she thinks, and a little terrified of her. Well, she's given him reason in the past, she supposes, to be nervous of how she may react. She wants to reach over and take his hand until he calms down but she doesn't think she can, she's not sure if that's something they do now. She's always been bad at that, knowing which levels of contact are right and necessary and which are too intimate for two people so uncertain about each other.

"Do you want to travel as husband and wife, or father and daughter?" Red asks, very careful, very precise as though he's trying desperately to sound clinical, like it's not the most fundamental unresolved issue of their relationship.

She watches his posture go stiff like he's braced himself. Poor Red, she thinks, I've conditioned him to expect the worst from me. But she isn't angry at him anymore, all she feels is panic and regret and the constant need to study him, to understand him, to understand how she'd missed the single-minded devotion in him, the adoration she sees in his every expression and every gesture — even as he watches her now, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

She doesn't know what to say. She's mute with indecision, not because she has any confusion about what role she'd rather play and which makes her profoundly uncomfortable, but because she can't tell which Red would prefer. Even choosing which ruse to put forward feels like broadcasting something that could leave her so very vulnerable. She takes a halting breath and stares him down.

"I'm not interested in pretending to be your daughter, Red. Not as a cover," she says. She sounds angry, but she's not, exactly. She's frustrated, yes, and tired of this same old issues always hovering around them, always unresolved and always niggling in the back of her mind. Why does he care, why does he stay, is it only the obligation of blood which doesn't interest her — that question is long resolved, at least — is he only interested in replacing what he's lost, is it guilt and duty that moves him or something more specific to her. She's tired of it, but for once she doesn't think she's angry, only done, only ready to move on.

"Not as a cover," he repeats back, slowly, and it sounds like a question he's trying to sneak in under the wire.

"Not at any time," she says, as deadly serious as she's ever, ever been with him, "I'm not sure what your motives are a lot of the time, but if that's… if that's what you're trying to find, I can't do that for you. I can't, Red."

"I'm not asking you to," he says, with not a hint of remorse or frustration. He's holding her gaze, with this little nod and this little twitch of his lips like he's expecting her to intuit something more from his words.

She blinks. She fidgets with the little stack of laminated ID cards. The back of her neck feels hot and her palms are sweaty, but it's a relief. A shaky, vulnerable kind of relief.

"So," she says, "Do you have one of these in mind?"

"I have no particular preference, Lizzie, feel free to choose what you like. You need to feel you will be comfortable with the name for at least a day or two at a time."

She lines up the four options for them both two by two in front of her and leans her chin on her folded hands. They're not remarkable names, the idea is to put up a smokescreen of ordinariness to the world, don't look here, we are just as unremarkable as the next people. Michael and Jessica St. James, Jack and Sarah Marsden, Paul and Laura Pendergast, or Hank and Krista Larson, all viable options set out in front of her. She thinks of pretty but belligerent little girl named Jessica who'd made her life difficult in third, fourth and fifth grade and decided she couldn't answer to the name without flinching. The others mean nothing to her.

It's his aliases that decide her. One of them she feels suits him so well, she's sure she'll be able to call out to him effortlessly as her new false husband. She may even have an easier time with an alias than if they travelled as themselves, leaving her to get used to his real given name. She wonders if she ever will, if she'll even get the chance. A comfortable alias is a start.

"Jack and Sarah," she says, pushing the relevant cards towards Red, "I can live with that."

*

It's long hours in a car again, only this time they're up front and Red takes the first shift driving since he actually knows where they are and where they're going. She studies the maps in the glove compartment though, until Red grumbles at her about number of times she's hit him with the flailing edges of it as she maneuvers the thing around.

"If we had GPS, I wouldn't be mangling these poor maps and we could switch off driving," she snaps, over the crumpling of paper.

"If we had GPS we could conceivably be tracked if our plate number was reported," he tells her, reasonable as ever, "Do you not trust my driving, Lizzie?"

"I do, it's not that. I just don't like sitting and stewing. I've always been bad at long car trips," she says, "I used to drive my dad crazy driving to visit his folks when I was little. Sitting still in a small space for hours is not something I'm well suited for."

"This would be the 'tedium' element of being on a fugitive I mentioned the other night," he says, "I'm sorry that there's no option but to endure the next few days. If we could travel in my jet, believe me we would be doing so."

She sighed but settles in and tries to put her mind on other things. She's going to have to learn to withstand these days in travel without being consumed with frustration, she realizes, if she has any chance of surviving her changed circumstances. Red had been perfectly clear about that her first night on the run. She just hadn't believed it then, hadn't seen that she could be anything other than terrified and paranoid to the point that boredom was inconceivable. And she is paranoid, still, which seems to add to her restlessness, but she trusts Red and his years of experience. He wasn't always the rich and powerful pillar of the underworld society he is now, she's sure he knows how to keep them safe even though he's only in partial contact with his network.

In the past she would have used their confinement to press him for details about her past and his, whatever details still sat undiscovered in her distant memory. But she's grown squeamish, or weak-hearted. She's afraid to know more, at least for now. She needs some time to get used to what she's learned already, and so far she hasn't — and can't, how can any person get used to the idea that they've caused the death of their own father. She knows it to be true, she feels the weight of it in her gut, but she's also got the sense that these are details out of a greek play or a shakespearean drama, like she's a Rosencrantz or a Guildenstern, stumbled suddenly to self-awareness and yet still ignorant of they whys and wherefores, still on an inexorable string of events from something to something which she can't understand. She's afraid to look farther behind that veil and see other horrors await, she'd rather focus on the journey at hand rather than keep digging and learn what else of her is false or else begin to see the specter of the noose at the inevitable end of the ordeal.

She trusts Red. She trusts him with a new, furious, giddy fervor that she doesn't think she's ever experienced before. But she doesn't trust herself, and she doesn't trust her past. She doesn't trust her ability to withstand even one more revelation until she's breathed for a while, and adjusted, and the world has lost it's peculiar, figmentary gleam — not so soon after killing a man and remembering killing another, not so soon after crawling out of her husband's bed and feeling like she'd rather peel off her own skin than remember what she'd done.

So she doesn't ask. She doesn't wonder. She doesn't prod and badger and pout, and she's disappointed in herself and her complaisance, but it's the best she can manage. She talks about the trips she used to take with Sam as a kid, the kindly suburban alienness of Sam's folks, who both passed away when she was still in elementary school and too young to understand the depth of the loss Sam suffered.

Red tells her about going to visit his grandparents on their little farm in Pennsylvania every summer. He talks about the little pond on their property, with a tire swing hanging over it like something out of a movie, and trying to keep up with his older cousins when he was a kid. He talks about his grandmother with such reverence and love, with this sweet, distant smile on his face — she watches his profile as he talks, not trying to hide her scrutiny, and she's sure if he weren't driving he'd be gesturing expansively to help her picture that childhood vista, both grand and homely. She knows from his file that his mother died when he was 14, a tender and precarious age for a boy to lose his mother, but she can tell, hearing him speak about his grandmother, that she stepped into the role with generosity and patience.

She wishes in the most impractical but personal way that he could show her that old farmhouse from his childhood, that mild woodland and idyllic pond, but the places of his past are just as barred from him as her own. They've each made their own fate, and it forces ever forward.

They keep snacking on the cookies she baked instead of stopping for a decent meal, which she feels is almost justified by the way she's still somewhat recognizable and likely still plastered all over the news, though the sweets aren't the best remedy for restlessness. Red enjoys them, too, declares them the best he's eaten in years, and she's more pleased than she feels is proportionate to the compliment. Eventually she falls asleep on the waning end of the sugar high, and that's a blessing in itself.

The hotel where Red directs them is a nice one, the kind of place that she and Tom would have gone to as a special treat for a long weekend after making a show of saving up. She's surprised, and even more surprised when Red hands the keys off to the valet and lets the hotel staff manage the bags. She watches him with obvious questions on her face, frozen in her spot on the sidewalk of the hotel portico, as he slides his blue anorak back on against the clammy evening chill. His gestures, the little shrug of his shoulders and the tug of the collar is so familiar to her, though the mild, benign look on his face and the mushroom colored merino half-zip and dark crewneck under the jacket are not, are almost startling to her. She's surprised by how unimposing he seems, how ordinary and unassuming —although still confident — he is, just at this moment.

She shivers slightly, feeling limp from long time spent sitting and the cold city air after the heated car. She wishes she hadn't stowed her jacket in her bag, wishes she didn't still feel always a step behind and off-balance.

"You alright there, Sarah?" he asks, glancing back at her from where he's paused by the door, waiting for her to catch up, "Come on, we've got to make our check-in."

"Yes, Jack," she says, and trots over, her cognizance of their situation slipping back in place.

Of course he was handing off the car, letting the staff handle the bags. Acting in any way skittish or defensive would only call attention and, in any case, they're just ordinary people on a holiday.

She is Sarah and he is Jack, and they're a moderately affluent, childless couple going on a road-trip sabbatical after Jack's recent minor health scare. Jack's in investments and Sarah is a freelance non-fiction writer of limited success, and lately their relationship has been going through some tough times. They're seeing the country and seizing the moment, they're trying to reconnect, and Sara plans to write a carefully curated travel blog about their trip. They have nothing to worry about besides the fact that Sarah forgot to pack her clothes and running shoes for the gym and Jack needs to remember to pick up antihistamines before they hit ragweed country.

Everything about them is a little bit dissatisfied, a little bit crass, and thoroughly, masterfully unremarkable.

*

Their room is all creams and golds and sage greens, classic, tasteful but bland, smelling of clean cotton and dry, air conditioned air. There are two double beds, each piled high with plump white pillows and cream damask covered duvets, leagues above the lumpy pillows and polyester quilted bedspread of her old motel. It feels curiously backwards that she's treated to such luxury now that she's a newly minted fugitive, when in her just and righteous life she'd felt the need to put herself through as much near-squalor as she could manage without completely self-destructing.

Red bustles around, settling in, fussing with the bags, exploring the room. He has a routine, she can easily see, he must have seen so many hotel rooms and safe houses in his time. She supposes he has a ritual, a way to make each place feel enough his home for the night that he can feel at ease. She realizes she's seen parts of it before, without realizing it was something she could and should learn from — the way he observes the room, absorbs it and assesses its character and its exits, does a habitual sweep for bugs and then sets out his things, declaring the space his own.

She doesn't have a ritual. She doesn't feel at home. She unlaces her stiff, new boots and shrugs off her soft, oversized new sweater and flops down on top of the nearest of the beds, sinking deep into down comforter and feather bed and then doesn't want to move. My god, she thinks with thin, high-wire humor, crime does pay.

"Jack and Sarah are having room service tonight," she declares, "Because there's no way I'm putting those boots back on tonight."

"It's just as well," he says, coming around to perch lightly on the edge of the other bed, facing her, "It's still prudent to minimize your exposure to the public. Although you did wonderfully as we checked in, Lizzie. You've finally managed to shed the 'federal agent' stance, I'm impressed."

She makes a vague dismissive noise and throws an arm over her eyes. She's not sure what she did differently that was less 'cop' and she knows she's going to have to figure it out so she can replicate it. Mostly she'd been distracted by watching Red be Jack Marsden. She doesn't feel much like an Agent, though, so maybe that's enough. Her sense of surety and entitlement have vanished, perhaps with the moment her memories reappeared, and she's left adrift.

"After this," she says, "After we get out of the country, what then? You must have a plan. You've got to have something in mind so we can fight back."

"I have the beginnings of a plan, yes," he says, "It depends how the intel I leaked breaks in the news. Some of those stories are old, highly controversial, and highly classified so the credible news media is going to take its time and make sure they've got it right, even as they race each other to see who will get to take the credit for the expose. It will also depend on how the international players with an interest in the Alliance react when the scandal breaks in the States, how strong their stomachs are."

"You think some of them can be turned, or something?" She shifts herself upright with a rustle of crisp bedding in an effort to gage the level of candor on his face.

"Perhaps. Maybe not brought all the way around to fighting against them, but this is not a group of true believers holding fast to some kind of Masonic or Hermetic secret society," he says, unlacing his own shoes and moving to sit against his headboard like this is some kind of everyday, casual conversation, "It's a dog pile of power and money seeking held in place with a promise of mutually assured destruction if they ever try to turn on their cohorts. But if the benefit to turning on the alliance, or at least distancing themselves from it, begins to outweigh the threat incumbent in their betrayal then the playing field may begin to look different."

"So how are we supposed to know who can be bought off or turned away, or whatever," she asks, "It's not like you can just go and ask. Most of them want you dead, remember."

"Sweetheart, I'm not likely to forget," he says with a wry smile and a pointed but careful rotation of his right shoulder.

"Yeah, well that was basically my point," she says, frowning at him, "You can't go trying to recruit them, its too dangerous, and you can't exactly broker a new standoff either, now that you've released so much of the information from the fulcrum files. What else is there to do?"

"To be brutally honest, right now it's a waiting game. We get away from here, we get you settled in and comfortable on the road and then it's a matter of listening and whispering and seeing who's out there to listen. And we see how the news breaks, how much of a splash the inevitable senate hearings, DOJ and SEC investigations make in the news. The alliance has a strangle-hold in Washington but the bigger and louder the commotion around the scandal, the better it is for us," he says, reeling it off like he's addressing a room at large rather than talking directly to her, or perhaps thinking it through aloud for the first time. The he turns and watches her carefully for a while afterward, reading how she absorbs that information. He has a questioning look, a little worried crease between his brows like he's expecting something, or waiting her out.

"What?" she asks, sharp and faintly exasperated.

"Lizzie, do you entertain a hope of going back to your old job on the taskforce?" he asks, his voice suddenly gentle, hesitant, personal.

Everything in her tilts and falls, the immediate longing that sparks and dies as she thinks about it makes her dizzy. And yet, when she looks back at the constraints of that job and the blinders she'd put on to keep to her role and believe in it, when she looks back at how blatantly the FBI task force had been used time and again to further the agenda of the alliance, she feels frustration and not loss. She's left that behind now and can't even picture what it would be like to go back. More than anything, she's disgusted by the idea of reporting to and taking orders from an oversight committee riddled with alliance moles and their hangers on.

Being on the right side of the law and doing good, that's an ideal with which she's yet to part ways - though now it sounds like a fairytale, about as believable as twelve princesses stealing away to a magic ball every night or a prince being rescued from a beastly curse by a poor merchant's daughter - but by her own actions she is fully aware that she is barred from that ideal. She is a murderer now. She killed a man out of anger and fear, without the shield and blessing of her badge. She still hasn't come to regret it; she knows that Connelly would have followed through on every threat. But it doesn't change the fact that she can no longer claim the protection of lawful good.

"No," she says at last, "No, I don't hope for that, Red, I'm not so naive, anymore. I'm not really sure I'd want to, knowing what I know now. But there's no going back after what I've done."

He just nods in response, his expression so sympathetic it's crushing, she actually feels a pressure in her chest. She thinks he's going to ask again why she did it but he doesn't, and she wants to tell him, she wants to tell him with an urgency that's almost like panic, but she doesn't want him to think about it and wind himself in guilt. She doesn't want to think about it, full stop. She keeps replaying it in her head these last long nights when she should have been sleeping, Connelly's smug, satisfied face and his threats raining down on her, how easily he could have reached out for Red and dragged him off.

How easily she could have lost him twice in the last few weeks makes her want to reach out and clutch at him. Instead she flops back down on the bed and rubs her hands over her face, pushing her new bangs off her forehead. She feels over-emotional and fragile and highly strung and every feminine thing she's tried to avoid appearing for however many years she'd spent trying to fight her way forward in her career.

"Are you alright, Lizzie?"

"Yeah," she says from behind her hands, which probably isn't very convincing, she can still feel his concerned gaze. She puts her hands down and stares up at the high ceiling instead. "Yes. Actually, I'm a lot more okay than I expected. Maybe that's not a good thing, but it's useful for the moment i guess."

"I don't think there's a timeline to adhere to, or a right or wrong way to react," he says softly, "I won't lie, it makes our journey easier, more likely to succeed if you can keep coping, keep helping me get us out of here. I don't think you can judge yourself harshly for being able to compartmentalize, after everything that's… after everything I have put you through, this last year and a half, it's a survival skill."

"Stop that. Damn it, I'm so sick of- You alone are not responsible for every bad thing, okay. I put myself through some of it, too, and so did Berlin and… and Tom," she sighs, and tries to compose herself, wishing she had some ability to stop herself from picking at him about this when she knows it will upset them both. It's easier, though -- now that she's started down this path -- talking about it looking at the ceiling than looking at Red. "Tom used to say that about me, you know. That I was responsible for every bad thing in our lives."

"Tom is a manipulative bastard who exploited your empathy, Lizzie," Red says, as angry as she's ever heard him, "I hope you knew that was nonsense, and an evil thing to say."

"Yeah. It was really shitty of him to heap all that on me," she clears her throat, tries to push past the wobble in her voice, the shame and anger in her chest, "That's actually what I'm trying to say here. Why is it that you know it's awful of Tom to lay the blame for everything at my feet, but think it's totally fine for you to do the same thing to _yourself_?"

"Because he knew he was lying, he knew you weren't in any way at fault and he still hurt you to make his life easier. I know that I'm at fault, Lizzie. I acknowledge my culpability," he says, still sharp, still angry, but also strained - heavy with regret, "It's the only way I can live with myself."

"But it _isn't_ all your fault. Some of it, yes. A lot of it, maybe even more than your share. I can understand your reasoning for a lot of it now, though, and your intent was good even if the end results weren't. No matter what, though, it doesn't justify you taking on the blame for absolutely everything, even those things which were done by those who were actively trying to destroy you. Even those things which were caused by me being an idiot," she says, regretting that she'd started them down this path, knowing her equanimity will utterly dissolve for the foreseeable future if she ends up seriously arguing with Red.

But she needs him to know it's not all his fault. She needs him to understand that she doesn't blame him, that she trusts his judgement, not matter how hurt or angry she has been or still is. The way she trusts and needs him now outweighs it all, everything they've put each other through before.

"You asked me," he says slowly, sounding now weary more than anything and she wants to look over at him but she knows that if she does she'll lose all semblance of calm, "Not to press you about what happened that day, with Connelly. I'm asking you not to press me on this. Not as an exchange, or a bargain but… I'm asking as one person to another, knowing that there are some things that... take time to confront."

She lies there and breaths, brings her hand up again, pressing it against her sternum, above her racing heart. She wonders how far she can push him before he breaks. She wonders when, in his universe, being asked to be kind to himself became such a cruel thing to do, something that could break him. _Christ you're a mess, Red,_ she thinks, blinking through the burn in her eyes and the helplessness sour on the back of her teeth, _Why didn't I notice it before?_ And, _I don't have any idea how to look after you so you'd better stop making me want to try._

"I don't understand, Red. You've done so much for me. Gone to such lengths to protect me, and Dembe and everyone you care about. You were going to give your life to Berlin to try and save Carla even though it sounded like you didn't even like each other anymore. I'm not saying that you should…" she gestures vaguely, dismissively, rolling over to look at him again, at last. She puts out her hand and, after a long few seconds of hesitation, he stretches over and takes it. His fingers are cold and dry and feel hesitant and trembling against hers - it occurs to her that for once, she is reassuring him. "I'm not asking for miracles here, but can't you at least see that these actions preclude you from being this awful, evil thing you've imagined?"

"It isn't that simple, Lizzie," he says, and he looks so pained, like she's tormenting him instead of trying to help him, "You don't know what you're asking."

"Okay," she says, giving his hand fingers a squeeze, peering up at him still, watching his averted gaze and downturned profile with concern, "Alright. It's okay."

"Thank you," he says, in the smallest voice, and she decides it right to let the matter drop.

*

The night passes slowly but unremarkably, no unfortunate dreams but no real sleep either, after her long nap in the car and the difficult conversation in the evening. It's strange that Red is right there in the other bed, not in his own separate space the way he was at the mountain cabin. It's strange to be back in a city with the noise of the traffic, and the noise of other people passing in the hall from time to time, reminding her of the bustle of life outside their isolated microcosm. But still, it's unremarkable.

They go down early to have breakfast in the dining room as Jack and Sarah. She's fairly sure he insists because she needs to practice being out in the world with a false identity and a sense of confidence. He has to remind her to stop scanning and assessing the other patrons, but she settles eventually, when no one recognizes her or even gives them a second glance. It also helps that Jack picked up his usual newspapers, over Sarah's objections that he's supposed to de-stress, and they flip through them to see whether anything new has broken rather than trying to make tired, stilted table conversation.

There's still nothing from the leaked fulcrum files in the news. She asks him about it once they're on the road again, and he says it's too soon to worry. Too many reputations hang in the balance for anyone to jump on old, classified and potentially ruinous stories without thorough vetting, not while the red meat of the AG's murder is still fresh on the ground.

But even as he reassures her, she can see the tightness in his jaw, the worry he's trying to ignore for her sake. It's been ten days since he got the ball rolling. She's pretty sure he expected to hear something by now.


	4. four (friends)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> on the road.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> part of this was supposed to go in the previous part but it got too long and then it got too long again so it gets to be it's own part. This means there are still two more parts after this one, if the outline holds. A small chapter and a big chapter in different ways.

The following days of their journey settle into a kind of pattern. Early, mumbly, quiet mornings as they both try valiantly to pretend that they’re morning people like Jack and Sarah as they put themselves together and get on the road. Usually they stop for additional caffeine late in the morning and Liz takes over driving, confident enough following the interstates and freeways to let Red rest and stretch his shoulder and dig through their stack of newspapers. 

She leaves the news mining to him, these days. She doesn’t like reading the pop-psychology analysis of her in the press, the wild theories of her pathologies based on half truths and wild notions. 

After the first time she saw herself called a sociopath she’d started shaking and let the paper fall to her lap, trying not to obviously fall apart in the sunny, airy atrium restaurant of the hotel in St. Louis where they’d stayed the night before. It had taken Red’s gentle grip on her wrist to rouse her from her daze, she hadn’t responded to her alias. She’d done her best calmly fold the paper and hand it back to him.

“Is everything alright, Sarah?” he’d said, half in character but plainly concerned “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” 

“Listen, I, um… I seem to be coming down with a headache. I’m not very interested in breakfast today, so I’m going back up,” she’d said, picking up her purse and fumbling with her chair.

Red had taken her hand before she slipped away, a silent, honest question on his face, grave worry that wasn’t in character all. She’d squeezed his hand, grateful for the support, but the restaurant wasn’t busy enough or loud enough that their voices wouldn’t carry and she didn’t feel able to explain exactly why she was upset in any case. Of course they didn’t know her, of course she was going to look like the villain in this story. But it had still hurt, and she didn’t know how to cast it off as meaningless hyperbole, and the way she was getting hung up on getting smeared in the press instead of focusing on the real issues made her feel petty and egoistic. She didn’t want Red to see her that way.

Impulsively, she’d leaned down, as though she were giving her husband a kiss on his temple, letting her cheek rest gently against his. “I’m okay,” she’d murmured to him, “I just need a little break from the reality of it.”

She allowed herself to breathe in his familiar warmth, the clean, cedar spiciness of his soap still bright and strong from his morning shower, closing her eyes to soak it in. Then she squeezed his hand again and pulled away. 

“I’ll meet you back at the room. Don’t hang around all morning with your crossword, Jack,” she’d told him, back in character, “We don’t want to get stuck in the pre-lunch traffic.”

She’d fled back to their room after that, trying to get her head around why she was so upset. It sounded so familiar. It was so easy to believe. She’d felt sick with dread even though she didn’t know what it was she dreaded. 

She knew that she’d made herself the villain in this story, but somehow she hadn’t expected that the spin would paint her as somehow worse even than Raymond Reddington, notorious criminal, as cold and scheming and either brainwashed or vengeful and insane. She didn’t expect that her poor, put upon teacher husband who’d eventually left her would come out looking the most rosy and guiltless of the players in the tale. She doesn’t want to know what else they said after that. It doesn’t interest her. 

Their days of travel grow comfortable to her. Their silences are comfortable rather than awkward, and even though nothing much new is decided, the air between them feels clearer than it ever has. She feels on surer footing with him, now that they’ve ruled out the subtext of surrogate roles they each half-expected to be required to play. 

Their lodgings are all comfortable and expensive without being ostentatious or truly extravagant. Red had explained that living up to the standards of his usual persona would get them noticed in an instant, and yet scurrying from motel to motel and constantly checking furtively over their shoulders would be just as noticeable. They must at all costs avoid acting like fugitives on the run, and the simple functions of habit and human perception would keep anyone they met from assuming they were anything but what they appeared. Maybe one or two people might notice a passing resemblance, but ordinary people in ordinary lives aren’t in the habit of expecting to see a notorious criminal in their day to day lives, and therefore, when presented with one in the guise of an innocuous traveler, they simply don’t notice him.

She has doubts about this principle every time they check in, but it holds true each and every time. The most suspicious reactions they’ve gotten are assessing glances between their faces and their obviously-not-new wedding bands, likely trying to calculate the difference in their ages — and whether or not Jack robbed the cradle when wooing his pretty, young bride. People see what they expect to see and nothing more.

**

The fourth night, things are going smoothly. They’d cut across Kansas and Colorado instead of risking being found traveling through Liz’s home state of Nebraska, a decision she’d embraced because being so close to her old home but unable to go visit Sam’s grave one last time as they passed through was simply too much for her to think about. They’d finally hit Wyoming and stopped in Cheyenne for the night, in a hotel with a lot of enthusiastically rustic timber framing in the lobby and Southwest Native style art prints on the walls of their room. He even talks her into eating at a real restaurant, both of them tired of the bland, over salted food that seemed to be endemic to room service food.

She’s getting used to her new, higher quality but far more casual clothes, and the bangs that still make her forehead itch from time to time, the looser, less aggressive gait she’s training herself to use. She’s getting used to going out on Red’s arm as Sarah — who, absurdly she thinks of as a whole character, a woman who is a little bored with and a little frustrated with her husband but genuinely loves him. she’s caught herself wishing their aliases were their real selves, that they could leave Liz and Red behind and step into a new, simpler life where all they had to worry about was a mortgage and a mild existential crisis. She knows that playing pretend won't help them though, any more than it helped her and Tom.

Still, it’s a nice evening at a casual steakhouse as recommended by hotel concierge. Not exactly the best meal of her memory, but it’s a nice change from eating in their room. It’s nice to see Red loosening up after a couple of drinks, spinning her wild tales of his own early days on the run. Not the grim, unspoken interval after his family disappeared and before he fell in with his own kind of mentor, but the bizarre adventures he went through with Albert, the man he learned the trade from, whose empire he had apparently inherited — a man even more genuinely eccentric than the persona Red put on. 

It’s illuminating, or it would have been if Liz hadn’t been so wrapped up in Red’s conspiratorial tone and his wry humor in his retellings, the way his face lights up recalling his own bewilderment and sense of being both inevitably doomed and also blessed with imperviousness at every turn. She’s had enough to drink herself and feels so at ease that she struggles to remember that they're not just on some strange case, to remember that she needs to stop scraping the hair back from her face and leaning in to the warm vividness of his voice like a fidgety girl with a crush.

The walked arm in arm back to the hotel through the dry, biting cold of the early spring night in Wyoming. It was clear and a bit breezy and Liz found herself leaning into Red’s arm, a little unsteady even on her flat, sturdy shoes. 

“I like you this way, sweetheart,” he says as they walk along.

“What, a little bit tipsy and leaning on you?”

“No,” he says, with a find little laugh, “Relaxed, willing to have a good time for a few hours. It’s good to take a little break from being worried, now and then, hmm?”

“It’s nice,” she says, giving his arm a squeeze and their hips bump together for a second, “It’s like you… reach a stress saturation point. Like white noise or something, and after a certain level… it’s more like nothing than worry or… I don’t know what I’m saying, but I yeah, it’s nice to be distracted for a while. Thank you.”

“It’s my pleasure,” he says, “I don’t know that I can be for you what Albert was for me, back then, or even if that kind of experience would helpful. But I’m glad I can distract you for a while. It’s good to hear you laugh, Lizzie.”

“You were really close to Albert, weren’t you?” she asks, quiet and personal, sobering in the cold, sweet night air.

“Yes. There’s no telling what kind of sorry state I’d be in without his influence. Or the resources he passed on to me”

“You never talk about him, though,” she says, a kind of half-question.

“In concrete terms, our association lasted only around five years. But it came at a crucial moment in my life. A low ebb, I suppose you could say. He was a genius, most of his activities were never detected so he wasn’t particularly notorious in the way that I am, so he took a real risk in tying his reputation to mine. He approached all this projects with a certain diabolical glee, and he did some truly awful things in the name of vengeance — I remember a few particularly vicious arguments we had over the lengths he’d gone to… I didn’t understand until there were people for whom I was responsible, friends I’d put in danger that,” he shook his head as though dismissing that line of thought and moved on, “Somehow in spite of that there was a cleanness to him, this undimmable childlike quality of curiosity and wonder at the world. It was endearing and infuriating in equal measures, he would take on endeavors that seemed designed to get us all caught or drive us all mad, just because it suited his sense of the absurd. But his plans were things of demented beauty, they always pulled us through in the end.”

“You know that it sounds like you’re describing yourself, right?” she says, smiling over at him, “Mad, scary accurate plans, sense of wonder and all.”

“Really?” he says, and shrugs, “You’ve caught me out, Lizzie. That’s the other reason I don’t talk about Albert, a large portion of my… shall we say, public image was modeled after him. Revealing the inspiration rather spoils the mystique, don’t you think?”

“I think no amount of emulation would be enough to do what you do all on it’s own, not without inborn talent,” she says, she’s not surprised at how proud she sounds, not really, “I think your Albert found a kindred spirit, that’s all. Can I ask… what happened to him?”

“He died,” he says, with the calm regret that comes with a large but long dealt with loss, “It was a heart attack, actually. A natural death, perfectly ordinary. Not even unexpected, either, as it turned out. He’d suffered from a heart condition for years, but I hadn’t known about it… he didn’t want any handling with kid gloves. Kate had tried to get him to change his habits but he wasn’t interested. She said he wanted to enjoy all his favorite things for as long as he could rather than suffer a period of prolonged deprivation.”

“Kate?”

“Kaplan. Ah, did I leave out that detail? Albert was Albert Kaplan. They were married at the time I met them.”

Liz comes to a full stop at that bombshell, dragging on his arm until he followed suit. “Wait,” she says, “I thought Mr. Kaplan was gay.”

Red shrugs and looks at her, head cocked to the side, “Kate Kaplan was married to Albert thirteen years, until his death, though they both pursued outside relationships from time to time. She’s also been in committed relationships with women. She’s never specifically told me how she identifies. Human sexual identity is a spectrum rather than static, Lizzie, you know that.”

“Okay,” she says, and starts walking again. They’re almost back to the hotel after all, and she freezing by now in her trendy canvas jacket. “I… feel like that’s more information than I was supposed to have, actually.”

“Darling Lizzie. You’re scared of her, aren’t you?” he says, laughing, “Kate would get a kick out of that. It’s her work life, not her personal life, that she keeps secret. I trust that her work is still undisclosed, yes?”

“Yes,” she says, and wonders just how long she’s been creeping over to Red’s side without really realizing. She first met Kate Kaplan more than a year ago, long before she’d had an inkling of the fulcrum, even before she’d unmasked Tom, and yet her instinct then had been to protect the secrecy of Red’s asset from the prying eyes of the taskforce. 

She does not think about how easily the word ‘darling’ just slipped from his tongue, or the way she felt for a second warmed and bright as she heard it. She does not think about the way casual affection from him, as Red not as Jack, makes something in her unclench and begin to relax.

*

She’s sitting up in bed later that with the television on — only one bed this time out, but it’s a king size and really there hardly any difference in listening to each other doze from two feet away instead of three — while Red’s in the bathroom getting ready for bed. The buzz from the drinks has faded, if anything she feels wired and restless from days of such limited physical activity but she wants to hurry to lights out anyway, as these strange interludes as she sits alone in a strange hotel in her pajamas, listening but not listening to Red putter at the end of the night are still awkward and surreal for her. She heard the shower shut off a few minutes ago and she expects him out soon, if the past few days are enough to judge his habits. She can’t seem to concentrate on any program or movie as she flipped through the wide array of channels, even old favorites made her feel small and bruised as they reminded her of simpler times now lost to her, and she turns it off just in time to hear a commotion from behind the closed door. 

There’s a crash, like something falling or being knocked to the floor, followed what sounds like fairly comprehensive swearing from Red and then another small thud. For a second, absurdly, she wonders if there’s an intruder that she somehow also missed when she’d washed up earlier but that’s a ridiculous notion. She thinks of his half-healed gunshot wound and is immediately more concerned than is reasonable, but she’s up and across the room before she gives it much thought, plush cream carpet soft under her bare, fidgety feet as she puts her fingertips lightly on the closed bathroom door. This is a line she won’t cross without invitation.

“Red?” she calls softly, “You alright? There was a noise.”

“It’s fine,” he calls back, but his voice is sharp, frustrated, and she doesn’t believe him, “I’ll be out soon.”

“You sure?” she rests her forehead on the door, her hand going to the handle despite her best intentions to leave him be, respect his boundaries even though he so seldom respects hers, “You… I noticed you’re still favoring that shoulder, do you need some pain killers or something? I got some Advil the other day for my head, remember…”

“It’s fine, Lizzie, I only dropped something,” he says, but she hears another clatter and a little grunt of pain.

She opens the door, can’t help herself, spurred by the ridiculous, disproportionate protest that cries out in her every time she’s noticed Red in discomfort since the shooting — she could maybe blame on the tiny shift of lowered inhibitions from the drinks at dinner, that she’d previously thought worn off. Even when she’d distrusted him over Tom and the fulcrum, she’d balked in dismay at every mostly-hidden wince. That tender, useless protective urge had only grown since they’d been on the road together, since she’d seen from up close that he was so attentive to her, so protective, but obviously still recovering as he tried to pretend it was back to status quo. 

She’s met with a waft of warm, humid air left over from his shower, heavily scented with his cedar and vanilla soap. That in itself is intimate, the way the warm dampness settles against her skin. As is the sight of Red standing at the bathroom counter, in only his pajama pants, head down and one hip braced against the counter front as he attempted to reach behind himself to rub something between his shoulder blades, his back. 

His back, which she can’t see very clearly in the dim amber light from above the mirror but which seemed strangely mottled, and a different texture as it moved over his shoulder blades. Scarred, she realizes, his shoulders and back were scarred, not here or there, but extensively, the whole expanse of skin covered as if from acid — or flames. Burns.

She tastes smoke in the back of her throat, not the sweet-spice of his familiar soap. She feels suddenly little, and lost. She’d known this, known he was there, of course she had, she’d even known he’d been hurt, perhaps not quite consciously, but she’d known. But she hadn’t realized, her mind shrinks from it even now, the extent to which he must have suffered.

He hasn’t noticed her, his gaze averted from the mirror where she is clearly reflected, but she makes a little noise, hardly more than her breath catching in her throat in realization but it’s enough. His head lifts, their eyes meet in the glass. His face is frozen in some stern shape, she thinks perhaps it’s anger, or apprehension that flickers through in the twitch of his cheek, the set of his chin, though he looks golden also in the dim light, proud and stoic. He looks away again, so that she can neither see his expression clearly in reflection nor over the mottled curve of his shoulder. 

She stands in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb hard for balance, unable to advance or retreat. Only her toes touch the cold tiles of the bathroom floor, but she feels chilled, she has the sinking feeling that she’s broken something of what they’ve built by intruding. 

“I… I’m sorry, I was worried,” she says, and trails off, uncertain.

“I’m not an invalid, Elizabeth,” he says sharply, and she remembers him saying the same thing the week before, at their mountain cabin, in a softer version of the same defensive tone.

“I know you’re not,” she says, and averts her gaze as well, sliding her eyes away from his scarred skin and the broad, firm lines of his shoulders, the gentle curve of the small of his back which seems strangely vulnerable to her. She feels like she’s stolen something private from him and her cheeks burn hot. “But you also sounded like you were in pain,” she says, trying to justify herself.

“Lizzie,” he says and stops, the subtext of their past wedging it’s way uncomfortably into the small room. The he sighs and straightens up as she watches out of the corner of her eye, as though shrugging it all off. It’s a bluff, she thinks, she recognizes some of Jack’s arrogant ease in his posture, but at least its not the defeat and anger he’d shown before. They’re going to get through this encounter even if they have to bluff their way through.

“It’s alright, Lizzie,” he says, turning towards her part of the way, so that she can see him in profile.

“That’s from that night?” she asks, unable to stop herself, “From— from my fire?”

“That night, yes. Not your fire though, Lizzie, please don’t think about it that way. They’re just scars, long healed, nothing to worry about.”

“Then what…?”

“The scar tissue doesn’t produce oils the way normal skin does,” he explains, matter of fact, “I need to use moisturizing cream or it becomes… rather uncomfortable. Usually, I put it on after washing. But I’m having some difficulty… reaching just at the moment.”

“Because your shoulder is not as healed as you’ve been pretending,” she says, hesitation forgotten in a sharp sensation of ‘i told you so’ and worry.

“It isn’t as much the incision site — which is nearly healed — as the under-used muscles around it protesting all this time spent behind the wheel,” he says, and sighs. He threads the lid back onto the dark green glass jar she notices at last on the counter in front of him and reaches for the dark colored t-shirt folded neatly beside it. 

She watched avidly, focused on the precise, economical motions of his hands rather than the shocking bareness of his skin. He’s so fastidious, so neat in all his habits. It fascinates her, it pleases her to watch him if for no other reason than it’s inexplicably satisfying to see how he interacts with the universe.

“It’s alright, Lizzie,” he repeats, a tightness to his voice beneath the jovial gloss, glancing at her in the mirror again, “I’ll be out momentarily. I’m done with this particular fruitless exercise for the night.”

Liz takes a step forward, with no forethought besides the feeling of injustice that this man who always did his best for her was uncomfortable and upset and that is not acceptable. “I could,” she says, reaching for the jar of lotion, “I could help you with that.”

He freezes, obviously deeply uncertain about her motives, her intentions, whether to call a stop to what she hopes he doesn’t feel is a wholly inappropriate intrusion. 

“It’s been a few days, right? At least,” she says, taking another half step forward, thinking that this, at least is something she can do for him. An apology, a gesture of gratitude, something helpful which doesn’t necessitate her stumbling over heavy, too-personal words meaning if it weren’t for you, I’d be shattered to pieces on the ground, or dead or in jail and I still don’t know how I found it so easy to think you meant to do me wrong. “Because you were hiding it well, but that shoulder wasn’t any better back at the cabin.”

He turns to face her directly for the first time since she entered the bathroom and she tries valiantly not to blush at the intimacy of the sight of him bare chested, hopes he will blame the low, warm light and the lingering humidity from the shower. It’s so different from that ghastly afternoon when she saw him bloodied and semi-conscious as the doctors cut his shirt away, or as she peered through plastic sheeting and around surgical drapes, waiting to see if the tiny bomb in the bullet would go off. She’d been too choked with fear then to care what she saw, to care that she was coated in his blood or that she’d laid her hands on his bare skin. The only thing that had mattered was their mutual survival that day. But now he’s a healthy, conscious man standing before her, and she realizes it in a different way than she ever has before.

He’s holding the t-shirt in front of himself in a half-gesture of self protection from her gaze, but she can see the angry pick line of the new scar on his breast, the soft line of his clavicle. She can suddenly tell that he’s made up of softer flesh over firm muscle that shifts as he stands and fidgets, full of tension in front of her. 

She meets his eyes again, fighting embarrassment, thinking maybe she’s in over her head but she wants to help. She wants to help him be comfortable. Jack would ask Sarah to do this, she thinks, somewhat nonsensically, he would ask easily and comfortably, assured in the knowledge that his wife loved him and would do for him because they were partners. 

She’s stung by a sudden, miserable longing that Red could be as easy with her as Jack would be with Sarah, but he isn’t. Not when things are serious. Not when he has to choose whether or not to place himself in her hands and trust her not to hurt him. And she has a sinking feeling it’s because she’s broken his trust and used it against him as often as she’d felt sure he’s broken hers.

She deflates, takes her hand off the smooth metal lid of the jar, is determined to leave and give him privacy so he can wince his way through putting his t-shirt on without her watching, when he catches her wrist, stops her. His fingers graze the terribly sensitive heel of her hand and she shivers faintly, and he lets go. 

“Okay,” he says softly, “Yes, Lizzie. It would— I would appreciate the help.”

“Okay,” she says, and picks up the heavy jar, and a clean white hand towel from the pile of spares on the counter. Stands for a few rapid heart-beats, indecisive. “Actually, let’s sit down,” she says, already walking back out to the main room and willing him to follow, “It’ll be easier.”

So Red sits on the edge of their bed and she kneels behind him, stumped for a moment at how they got here. He’s silent as a stone but it’s not a particularly comfortable silence. She puts out a dry hand and rests her fingertips on the blotched skin of his back. He’s warm, a natural human warmth that she knows better than she will often admit, and the scar tissue is smooth not ridged, but yes, it’s dry. She wonders if it itches, and bites her lip.

The cream is sweet-smelling and neutral, not the pine-spice-musk hyper-masculine scents of the limited unguents her few exes have owned, and rich under her fingers. She wagers it costs more than a dozen of her own old standby potions. He flinches as she applies the first dabs and she flinches back, in turn. We’re useless, she thinks, like a couple of nervous cats who don’t know what to do with each other.

“Sensitive?” she asks.

“No, cold,” he says, and then “It’s just skin, Lizzie, perfectly normal. It only looks a little different.”

She warms the cream between her palms, but works it in gently just the same. Her hands used to get so dry in those Nebraska winter’s back home, and then they’d sting like she’d dipped them in rubbing alcohol when she tried to catch up with moisturizer. She hopes it's not that bad for him. He doesn’t twitch under her hands though, after those first few moments, where her hands had shaken and they’d startled each other. If anything he starts to relax. 

The scars are just normal, after all, not ridged like her own — makes her wonder if she really did get hers in that fire, but she sets the question aside as soon as it floats by — but almost satiny in some places and rougher in others. Thinner and less elastic than the smooth, firm flesh that borders them, but still as he’d said, perfectly ordinary, just skin. 

She smooths at the tense muscles of his shoulders, feels out the wings of his shoulder blades. Somehow this doesn’t feel too intimate, not like before. More like what it feels like when he holds her, when she’s upset. More like a communion, a message of support. Affection batters around in her rib cage like a trapped bird, and her eyes sting for no reason she can name.

“Muscle spasms, right?” she says, interrupting their silence, “Your surgeon said to look out for that, later.”

She leaves out the parts where Nick had to be badgered into telling her about what his recovery would be like, had done a lot of territorial posing and leveled a few accusations before hand — about how she had barely left his bed before jumping into Tom’s and now apparently had left both her husband and her sanity for a wanted criminal — how she’d ridden it out until she snapped. Yelled at Nick that he didn’t know Red, that he’d saved her over and over and hadn’t asked for anything, but that Nick had demanded thousands of dollars to treat a dying man when the Hippocratic Oath should have been enough. 

Nick had been chasten enough, shamed enough by her righteous anger that he’d been willing send her an email later with basic information. Not that she’d needed it, Red and his team had disappeared while she’d been confronting the Director and she hadn’t seen him again for two weeks. She’d obviously been surplus to requirements when it came to his recovery.

“Yes,” he admits, after deciding he wasn’t too embarrassed to talk about it, she supposed, “But it’s nothing serious. Just a symptom of too much driving after too much inactivity.”

“Where?” she asked, starting to work on his mid back. He was twitchier here, maybe a little ticklish but he’d trusted her a great deal to allow this, she wasn’t going to stop and find out.

“Ribs,” he said, “That side. Nothing some rest and a muscle relaxer won’t cure. Honestly, Lizzie, you’re a worse mother hen than Dembe.”

“I don’t think so. I think Dembe’d be pretty mad at me for letting you slide on all that PT stuff you were supposed to be doing,” she says, thinking it’s all well and good to say ‘rest and a pain pill is all it needs’ when she’s yet to see him allow himself either, “That’s the real reason you didn’t bring him along, huh?”

She feels him laugh, just a little motion under her fingers as she runs her fingers along the uneven borders of the scarring as it trailed away towards his lower back, forgetting that there’s supposed to be thick lotion on her fingers to make this exercise fully above board and unquestionable. There’s more scarring on his right side than his left, as though he’d landed there, or as though he’d used that flank to shield himself — or shield something else. Someone else. 

She doesn’t want to ask. She also somehow doesn’t want to picture him hoisting up her child-self and carrying her out of the fire. She’s not interested in owing him that much more, and she doesn’t want him remembering her as that child.

“Lizzie… I hesitate to bring this up,” he says, and she stills, “but the surgeon. He was your ex, correct?”

“Yeah. He was.”

“We paid him a large sum of money and he stated an intention to pay down his student debts. That means there will be a money trail. It was clean cash, but he planned to change his spending habits and his name was previously linked to yours, the FBI may still end up questioning him. And the press as well, if they catch word.”

“Oh,” she says, startled by the thought, startled that it hadn’t occurred to her that by dragging Nick in, she’d invited his involvement in the rest of this mess, “Actually, we lived together for a while. Not even a year, but long enough that the New York field office had to know my change of address. And then we, um. Actually moved here— I mean to DC together. That would make it even easier for them to find him. I didn’t even think.”

“He doesn’t know enough to make trouble,” Red says softly, “But since you mentioned him, I realized you should be aware that… Doctor Sorensen’s opinion will likely be polled at some point in the proceedings.”

“Nick is an arrogant prick,” she says, sharp and frustrated and thinking ahead to the kinds of biased, bitter things Nick could say, “And I regret now that I got him involved again, but you were… It was an emergency. And he shouldn’t have needed to be paid off to treat the patient in front of him.”

“I don’t blame him for asking for money, risking himself for… a man such as me would be a lot to ask of conscience alone. Though I do blame him for making you upset, that was uncalled for,” he says, and she wonders what exactly Kate Kaplan passed along of that day, “Are you almost done back there, Lizzie?”

“Right, almost,” she says and warms more of the cream between her palms, “Let me know if I’m putting too much of this on.”

“It’s fine. I— thank you,” he says, halting and uncertain in the way she’s beginning to associate with him being sincere and personal with her, “this is very kind of you.”

“I don’t have to be being kind to want to, to help you,” she says, her fingers lingering for a moment on his flank and then wiping her hands on the towel, “We’re partners, you know. We’re in this together.”

she threads the lid on the jar and then disappears to the bathroom before he can think of a rejoinder. She washes her hands in cold water, glances in the mirror and thinks her reflection looks flushed. That trapped bird of terrible, heart-ruffling fondness still flutters away inside her. It’s strange, she thinks, how affection can buzz just as hard between her legs and behind her wrists and at the back of her throat as attraction. It isn’t restful and she needs to find a way to quiet it so that she can lie across from him like an unconcerned partner, not worry him with hovering. Hovering will smother and skew whatever it is they’re building, she knows him well enough to see that. 

She drinks a glass of tap water and waits until he’s turned out all but the bedside lamp before coming out back out.


	5. five (favour)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> welcome to the Tetons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay. A quieter chapter. Brace yourselves for next chapter, it's a dark one. But it's in the works. stay tuned.

They’re going to meet Calhoun Moss under their own names, because Red had done a fair amount of business with the man and they’re buoying up their safety in dealing with Moss with the full mass and reach of the Reddington reputation. He offered her the option of another alias, an assistant, an associate, a consort, something of less interest than her wanted name. But she’d turned him down.

He’d brought it up after leaving the Cheyenne hotel, to give them time to work out the details of the alias if necessary.

“The man would have to be deaf and blind not to know that we ran away together,” she’d said, too surprised and disbelieving to parse her words with less double meaning, “There’s no way he won’t know exactly who I am.”

“It would be a big bluff and we’d have to stick to it unrelentingly, but we could do it. We could pull it off. Calhoun might suspect something, but it wouldn’t allow him any room to ask you awkward questions about how you ran afoul of the Alliance.”

“But you said he liked that he was giving aid to the Cabal’s most wanted. An enemy of my enemy thing,” she’d countered.

“Yes. That’s my sense of him in any case.”

“So your credibility would take a hit if we pretended I wasn’t…” she’d made a vague gesture at herself, eyebrows raised.

He’d merely maintained his questioning gaze, waiting for her to voice an actual preference for their approach. He hadn’t even seemed particularly concerned about such a deception, but then he was used to such ploys. She’d realized that she was far more used to it as well, not that she liked to think about it. Elizabeth Keen was as much an alias as anything, even if her life had a paper trail.

“If… if he did ask about what happened, the terrorism charges, Connelly, what would I need to tell him to keep on his good side?” she’d asked, weighing it out in her mind.

“Not much. Not more than you want to share, I will make sure of that, but enough to make us credible. Cal likes to feel he’s doing a good deed,” he’d said, glancing over at her from the driver’s seat, “You want to go as yourself, then?”

“Yeah. If for no other reason than it’s the easiest thing to remember,” she’d said, smiling at the worn phrase, “Anyway, how many more opportunities am i going to have in the the coming months to go by my own name?”

“More often than you might think, actually,” he’d said, “Some of my business associates will count your alleged actions as marks of credibility. But it’s too early to worry about that.”

He’d let the matter drop, or she thought he had, but after several quiet minutes, long enough for her to be lulled by the highway noise, he’d spoken again with the same quiet regret.

“You don’t have to tell Calhoun Moss anything. The less he knows the better, in some respects. You don’t have to play the victim and you don’t have to play the killer. You don’t have to play any role that feels difficult to you, because there is nothing more dangerous in a tense situation than playing a role you can’t sustain,” he’d said, “But, Lizzie… someday soon I’m going to have to know what happened with Tom Connelly that day.”

“Why?” she’d said, sharp and defensive, “Why do you need to know? What can it possibly matter at this point? I did it. He’s dead. It’s done.”

“The man was one the top players in the field, Lizzie, but not the only player in the field. I need to know what he was planning, I need to be able to watch to see if there are still people deployed to carry out whatever it was in his absence. These people have money, they have political power, and they have manpower and resources I can’t match. Do you understand that? I’ve kept you and I and the business I inherited safe for the last twenty-five years only on the strength of a stalemate, because I’m a powerful man in my world but these people have coopted governments, and that stalemate has now dissolved, and the best thing we can do is know as much as possible as early as possible and plan accordingly,” he’d snapped, sounding worried and frustrated to an extent that was unfamiliar to her, "so yes, it does in fact still matter. And I don't need to know right at this moment, but it would be helpful if you could work towards a point where you are able to tell me."

She’d wanted to reassure him then, that she was sure that Connelly hadn’t had time to put any of his threats into motion, that she’d stopped him in time. But she hadn’t been able to make a single sound around the panic that had bloomed in her, her heart beating so hard her mouth stopped up. Every time he brought it up, she felt less able to tell him a single thing about it, the more acutely she felt the press of his guilt and hers, the more she felt the memory of Red sitting in the back of that car with her on that snowy night, demanding of her with all his cold fury and fear that she never do that again. That she never risk herself again for him. And she hadn’t promised, she couldn’t and wouldn’t promise, because even then, as conflicted as she’d been, his continued presence in her life had been more important than her safety.

It hadn’t even been six months after the night of the King’s auction til she’d been driven to murder on his behalf, choking on the terror of losing him and realizing with the clarity of desperation that she would do anything, anything to keep him safe. What would he do this time when she told him, she’d wondered, lost hours in wondering. She remembered the mute horror of that night, thinking that he was broken, thinking that he was going to break the fragile thing that was them to punish her for caring about him. How much worse was it going to be, how much harder was he going to try to break them when he knew that she’s traded her false charges for true murder on his behalf.

Red had been increasingly worried about her sudden, anxious silence, her refusal of all suggestions to stop for lunch, but she hadn’t been able to collect herself until it was almost time to stop at the resort where they were supposed to make the meet with Calhoun’s people. He’d apologized for upsetting her but she’d waved him off, knowing his curiosity, his need to know was more than justified. He’d tried ridiculous travel stories to try and distract her, raise her spirits, but she hadn’t even been able to rouse herself from her abstraction long enough to absorb what he was saying. In the end he’d taken her cold, clammy hand from where she fidgeted with it against her thigh and kept it, holding tight to her fingers, only letting go when he needed both hands for navigating the steep, winding road up into the Tetons, leaving the grasslands behind.

**

It gets colder as they head northwest, into the foothills, leaving the early spring of the flat lands for the lingering grip of winter in the stern, still mountains. The Blue Ridge mountains had been steep and yet gentle, sweet and damp and riotous with plant life. These mountains are different, imposing and deeply wooded with high evergreens as they rise above the golden, grassy dish of the plains, but arid, without the dense, sticky clotting of underbrush between the trees. It isn’t still, or barren but somehow stately, she is impressed by the natural grandeur around her watching the filtered daylight fade away as they drive up through the foothills. 

Calhoun Moss’s resort lodge isn’t a large complex, instead it’s marketed to truly select, exorbitantly wealthy clientele who value their privacy away from the maddening crowd. It wasn’t far enough up in the Tetons to get year round skiing crowd, but was built next to a natural hot spring and claimed to be a very peaceful and restoring retreat and health spa. Red let her know that in addition to the legitimate business of the spa, Moss used it as a place to meet with potential buyers and sellers, after a fearsome vetting process, for his sideline fencing operation for the truly discerning class of collectors. She and Red were to be staying at the lodge under the auspices of that sideline business, taken care of by the very discreet staff who were aware of Moss’s ‘hobby,’ who would apparently be used to special guests of the boss appearing at odd hours and being shuffled off to private quarters.

It’s an imposing place, from her perspective, as they come upon a set of electronic gates out of the woods, and then come up a long, sweeping, faux-lantern lined drive across a grassy plateau to the hulking shape of the lodge, still merrily lit despite the late hour. As they park in the front loop and climb out of the faithful vehicle, she feels overcome with the dry, biting cold wind that rushes at them and with a profound lightheadedness and disorientation, as though the ground is shifting under her feet or as though the scene around her is malleable and unreal. It's the altitude, maybe and she thinks also of the prolonged fasting, or the sense of rushing headlong from the sweet fastness of their own private company to the care and keeping if a man she absolutely didn't trust even though they've yet to meet.

She leans against the solid car door and tries not to pant, feeling the frigid, tangy, pine-sharp air make her a solid shape as I'd blew in in gusts against her, waiting for the paved ground to settle under her feet. They're parked in the deep black shadows away from the glow of the portico but not all the way out in the velvet blue twilight beyond, so Red doesn't notice her distress at first. She can hear him rummaging through the baggage for something but she doesn't expend any energy thinking what he might be trying to retrieve. She feels gripped with a gut-deep horror that they’ve made a mistake, that they’ve put a foot wrong somewhere and committed themselves to a plan that’s bound for disaster. She’s not sure where the flaw is, trusting Moss not to give them up, or perhaps taking an unfamiliar jet across more than half the country and then across the atlantic — she’s never been a comfortable flyer and the opulent but undersized nature of the gulf stream jets of the ultra rich have always failed to reassure her as to their reliability — but she’s certain, with a body blow intensity, that doom lurks ahead of them.

Red comes upon her in this state, and she startles when he’s suddenly right in front of her in the dark. She can’t read his expression, her eyes are dazzled by the lights of the lodge, but she can tell he’s concerned just the same. 

“Elizabeth?” His voice is a low murmur.

“Just a little… I don’t know. The mountain air’s a little thin, I guess,” she says, hears her voice has gone weak and over-high.

“Let’s get inside, then, and you can sit down, have something warm and bracing to drink, hmm?” he says, stroking her parka-ed arm in that gentle but distant way of his and makes to head to the entrance.

“Wait,” she says, and catches his wrist to halt him, gives it a tug to urge him back in front of her, “are you sure about this? Is Moss really safe? I have the most awful feeling about all this.”

“Lizzie,” he says, and shifts his hand so he can take hers, frowning down at how cold and clammy it is in his, “Have I ever given you the impression that I would put your life and freedom in the hands of an unsafe person? That I would ever gamble with your precious self?”

“No.”

“Can you trust, then, that I’m sincere in my belief that Calhoun Moss is the best route open to us out from under a county wide manhunt?"

"I trust you, of course I do, it's just... Okay. If you're sure, then okay," she says and sighs, realizing that it's the last thing she wants to start doubting hours judgement again, and it's very much too late to refuse Mosses hospitality. Surely be knows they've arrived. She thinks back to their conversion hours earlier. "He wants to help an innocent, right? I should be the hapless innocent framed by the conniving Alliance he despises." 

“Lizzie…” he says, in such a sad, longing tone, she can see well enough to catch the frown of regret on his face.

“No, come on,” she says, heading off what feels likely to be another apology with a strained smile and another gentle tug on his hand, “Strategy not sentiment, okay? We’ve got to go in and meet the man and I want to know how best to play it.”

“Yes,” he says, “Yes, that would be best, the poor, innocent under my care.”

“Okay. I can do that.”

She can’t manage another smile for him, but she nods decisively and manages to peel herself away from the solid vertical of the car door. Her breathing is close to under control now, and she’s shivering with the very real cold cutting through her canvas jacket, thinking almost as much about getting warm again as she is about how to play her role. Red doesn’t give up her hand, though, as he walks her into the lodge, and she’s profoundly grateful. She’s not ashamed of how tightly she clings.

**

Calhoun Moss is not over-tall, not even as tall as Red, and of some indeterminate point of healthy middle age. He’s thin and wiry and full of energy with a brush of close-cropped iron-grey and black hair and a vaguely aristo-anglo looking, angular face that’s not particularly remarkable but gives him over-all look of stubbornness and flippancy. She can see in his bearing and in the taut-skinned look of his face, as though he takes regular exercise and light cosmetic work in turns and calls it ‘clean living,’ and the burnished, soft skin of his hands, as though he’s never done a day’s hard labour in his life, that he comes from money and privilege from an early age. Not a man who made his fortune then, but one who was born to fortune and made more of it. 

She can sense a unmalicious but pervasive entitlement from Moss, and a casual but entire dismissal of her importance in proceedings as he and Red chat lightly over ritually-warmed brandies of persons and transactions largely opaque to her, what oddities Moss has been asked to try and acquire for people known to both of them, inquiries if Red knows who’s got certain rare pieces at the moment. She’s already coming to understand why Red views Moss with distaste. Hapless innocent, she reminds herself and sips her brandy.

The efficient and very discreet staff had collected them and their baggage from the lobby and ushered them to a private express elevator that required a special key card, issued only to Moss’s special guests, which she’d taken to mean his illicit associates. The attendant said nothing but that Moss was expecting them, and was waiting to greet them on the penthouse level. 

The elevator had let them out in a huge room, something like a great hall with lodge-like timber framing and vaulted ceilings disappearing above them and vistas of windows that were all black and mirror-like with the unspoiled night beyond. It was obviously the top-most level of the lodge, and the view was likely to be stunning in the daylight, but just then it was both unfriendly and cavern-like in it’s dim, echoing vastness. There were long, dark leather couches and a large, raised fire pit with a gleaming copper hood suspended above it mid way down the long room, glowing and crackling with a neat wood fire.

Calhoun had met them at the elevator banks and embraced Red warmly as a friend in bold tones and had then addressed himself to her in the careful, gentle way one might approach a trauma victim or a nervous child. She hadn’t been sure whether to take offense at this apparently genuine but disproportionate consideration. Technically, she’d supposed, she was a trauma victim, but that trauma hadn’t come out of a clear blue sky, she hadn’t gone straight from living a happy, normal life to being framed for terrorism, the traumas had come upon her in increments for far longer than she had realized until she had reached this catastrophic place, and like a frog being slowly boiled without realizing, she had acclimatized to the tenor of her surroundings. She might not be happy, and she might not survive the coming ordeals, but she was coping, she was used to it, and she’d had to fight hard not to bristle at the condescension she’d sensed in Calhoun’s manner.

After the hotel attendant is directed off with their baggage, and assurances given that they’ll be staying in one of his personal guest suites — Liz is still uncertain whether he assumes she and Red will be staying together or separately, but she’s sure she can manage either way — Calhoun had told them he was about to sit down to dinner and invited them to join him. She would have preferred to retreat to wherever it is they’ll be staying tonight and collect her wits, but Red accepted with an encouraging glance in her direction so she nodded her assent. It had been a very long time since late morning coffee and snacks, she was, after all, distantly aware that her body remembered this.

He’d ushered them around to a dining area beyond the fire pit, a long table — reclaimed wood from an old barn made by a craftsman of his acquaintance, Moss told them proudly — and dark, heavy chairs. There were three places set at one end of the table so he’d obviously expected them to join him, a decanter of pale wine standing ready, a number of pillar candles in simple glass and copper hurricane lamps that glow prettily but did little to lighten the dimness. Moss had placed himself at the head of the table, between her and Red, and that arrangement had seemed the logical one yet she had wanted to keep Red between her and their host, for comfort’s sake. She had hesitated before taking her seat, looking across at Red and worrying about this new tendency to cling.

The set dressing had all felt carefully and expensively produced to seem careless and casual, and the meal as well was all modern simplicity and quality ingredients; a fillet of baked salmon brought out on a cedar plank — flown in fresh that day from Alaska for the benefit of a piscatarian celebrity guest staying at the spa, he’d said — cold roasted tiny beets and carrots in a vinaigrette, fresh rustic bread, and butter that Moss told them came from a local farm. The food was good, despite Moss’ need to brag about it’s origins, not heavy or rich, and if she had been less on edge she would have enjoyed it, but she’d hardly noticed the tastes in her distraction. It had warmed her, though, and that’s a blessing.

Calhoun made a point to check in with her at the beginning of the meal, careful and solicitous but still in a way which makes her feel patronized, but then he had turned his attention entirely to Red, leaving her to eat in peace. She hadn’t had much to add to the conversation, found herself reaching for her wine glass more often than perhaps she ought given the fact that she must remember to play her role, but she’s also wrung with nerves and desperate to relax.

Now she does her best to lounge casually back against on the low-slung couches as Red does a few feet away, trying to assess Moss without seeming too intent. Moss had moved off their mutual interest in fencing rare goods and making covert connections and told them they were lucky to contact him when they did, that he’d been about to fly out to California to oversee some things. He talks of the drought, but entirely in terms of how it affects the small vineyard he owns, the expense and innovation of subterranean irrigation and its imminent installation — though as far as she can tell, he has someone else actually running the estate. 

“Yes, I’m sure the drought is expensive and alarming for everyone on the west coast,” she says pointedly, before she can stop herself.

Red shoots a quelling glance her way but their host merely nods with a serious and largely unaffected frown.

“That’s right. It’s a changing world out there, and it’s a terrifying one. I invest in green causes everywhere I can, but of course no one has deep enough pockets to fight off the oil lobby. I’m always telling Raymond here that his money could go a long way to help the cause even if he isn’t in a position to be an activist, but it seems his interests lie elsewhere,” Moss looks at her carefully, and she’s not sure if she’s reading casual innuendo or nascent flirtation in his searching expression, “Are you interested in conservation, Elizabeth?”

“I used to be,” she says cooly, doesn’t once think to invite him to call her Liz, “In as much as any underpaid, overworked government employee can have causes. But lately, the only thing I’ve been interested in preserving is my life and freedom.”

Moss’s demeanor changes at that, the joviality falling away and leaving him looking sharp, serious — nearly predatory, she thinks, but she isn’t sure if that’s real instinct or her own apprehension speaking. 

“Of course, I’m sorry. Here I am making the usual small talk when there are far more immediate and personal matters to discuss,” he says, and she’s surprised by how sincere Moss sounds. “No one fixed in the sights of those tight-fisted dictators is in for a happy ride. I’m happy help you both out any way I can. We can be wheels up as early as tomorrow, but you two are also welcome to stay here and hide out and make use amenities for as long as you’d like.”

“And I thank you for that, of course, Cal,” says Red, also genuine, “But I would prefer to get Elizabeth out of the country for the time being. I’ve put some things in motion in the capital but they’re taking longer to come through than I had anticipated. In other circumstances, we would love to stay and enjoy the hot springs, but I would prefer to watch it play out from a greater distance, if you see what I mean.”

“I don’t blame you, Ray. Those bastards come down like a ton of bricks on those they see as undermining them, believe me I have some idea what that’s like,” Moss says, and then looks over in Liz’s direction. “Don’t let me alarm you though, Elizabeth, this old bastard right here is a pro. Balls of steel on this one, and the brains to back it up. Whatever play he’s got running, I know you’ll come out the other side smelling like roses. You’ve got nothing to worry about in his hands.”

“Yes. I don't think there's anyone who's more aware of what he can do. Red has— Raymond has…” she looks down at her glass, at a loss. It seems to her entirely impossible to speak to anyone about the things that had passed between them, that Red had done for her, especially not to this affluent crime hobbyist. Those things are private, some of them painful, some of them glorious, but somehow all too close to her heart to be able to speak of them.

“I didn’t take you as a man to get sentimental after half a snifter of brandy, Cal,” says Red sharply, pulling Moss’s focus away from her uncomfortable pause. 

Moss laughs, let’s Red turn the talk to the plan for the next day. Moss has a property in the north of France, which it was entirely plausible for him to go visit, and his usual airfield will put them in easy reach of a little safe house Red keeps and then they can take advantage of Europe's excellent rail system to travel the Continent unobtrusively. 

As the talk drags on, she grows increasingly restless, enough to catch Red’s attention and he shifts subtly nearer to her side. She doesn’t dislike Calhoun, not really, but she finds him tiring, she finds his gaze both too sharp and too dismissive. She doesn’t know how to join in a conversation just at the moment, she realizes, she’s out of practice talking to anybody but Red. And she’s wary, she’s worried that Calhoun will see through the her veneer of trauma and naivety and decide she’s not worth the risk after all, old friend of Red’s or not.

Once Red and Calhoun have wandered well off the topic of the arrangements, she interjects and asks to be shown to her room, claiming pressing fatigue. 

**

Moss has given them a beautiful suite, a sitting room with a huge window overlooking the little valley and two separate bedrooms with their own little bathrooms leading off it to either side. She’d worried Red with her subdued mood, she could tell, but he’d let her slip off with a quiet goodnight. It was late, after all, and they were both lulled by wine and brandy, with an important day ahead of them. He’d headed off to bed as well, she assumed, because she couldn’t hear any noise from the central sitting room. She can’t hear anything at all, in fact, the mountain silence of the Tetons feels much more overwhelming than that of the Appalachians.

She’s surprised how quiet and unnatural it feels, lying on a plush bed and trying to fall asleep without Red’s presence in the room, the sound of his breathing nearby, with a whole room between them, and no good reason to seek out his space. Not even a week since they’d struck out from their first refuge and began nearly living on top of each other, but she’d acclimated immediately. She’d already gotten used to just talking to him without a second thought, not just of the fears and hardships that loomed but also the little everyday things, like they were just little everyday people who were friends. She’d already developed a habit of focusing on Red, wondering about him or just looking at him when she began to feel too submerged in the claustrophobic turmoil of her mind.

His presence with her at night had even seemed to keep the nightmares at bay, or if they’d come she didn’t remember them. She hadn’t woken in a blind panic in days, and when she’d woken at all, looking over to see him sleeping, — or resting, at least, she was never sure which — all solid and still, with one arm flung wide above his head, had bound her to reality, had reassured her that catastrophe was at least not yet catching up with them, that she was safe. 

Now she lies awake and alone and still, on what is likely to be her last night in her home country for a very long time. She’s clings to the idea that she and Red will be on the road together for a good while yet, but what happens after that is so amorphous and hollow, so full of the choice between empty aimlessness and a righteous fight she’s not even sure she believes in anymore, that it terrifies her. There’s a part of her, though, that’s glad, she can admit that to herself in her solitariness. Glad to be leaving the expectations of her colleagues that had begun to chafe. Glad to be leaving the memories of her husband that left her sick with shame. Glad to be leaving in a way that meant that neither her colleagues or her husband would be able to find her and press and press their demands. She hopes that maybe, once they take flight tomorrow and leave her homeland behind, she will fall the phantom grasp of those demands fall away — she doesn’t expect but she hopes.

Outside, the winds begin to turn, cold and churning and funneled through the valley. Slowly it begins to snow.


	6. six (sick)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snowed in. Bad dreams. Worse memories. trigger warning for Tom Keen and attendant issues.

They don’t leave the country that day. When she wakes in the morning, the mountainside outside her window is all but invisible through heavy clouds and driven snow, a late storm that sprung on them with a fury. Moss tells them that severe weather events are growing more and more common with climate change, and she believes it, but then again a snow storm mid-March in the mountains of Wyoming doesn’t exactly strain belief.

“I can’t believe none of us thought to check the weather forecasts,” she says over breakfast in the great room. 

“We had other things on our minds,” says Red, chagrinned, “At least these conditions mean that anyone trying to track us will be slowed down as well. But it was an oversight, and a serious one.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” she says, and smiles over at him, amused maybe beyond what’s proportionate by the irony. “I actually think it’s kind of funny. A pair of criminal geniuses plot a grand escape and forget about the weather. It’s cute.”

“I’m glad you think so,” says Red, “Because it means we’re stuck here at least until tomorrow.”

“I won’t take offense at that, since I know you’re under a strain, Ray,” Calhoun says from behind his paper. “Feel free to make yourselves at home, in any case.”

The long dining table on it’s dais seems friendlier in the light of day, though the day itself is close and dark. She’s settled herself at the far end, by the window, with every possible place between her and Red and Calhoun. She slept poorly, or not at all, and she’s not up to scrutiny from either of them. 

Her gaze is constantly drawn to the dense chaos of the driven snow and the frosted, shadowed shapes of the mountainside beyond. The massive wall of windows seem to bring the storm right up close, close enough to hear and taste. Close enough to be oppressed, or mesmerized. 

She hasn’t seen a proper winter storm since she and Nick moved away from New York, and she hasn’t missed it, not as a grown woman with responsibilities and commitments. Yet there’s something impressive about it, all that power and raging outside while she sits in the quiet quiet, safe cavern of Moss’s apartment. It makes her think of home, and Sam and parkas and mittens and the grey trek home from the bus stop, and those dull, snow speckled, windswept winters in Nebraska, that had made her think as a child that her future stretched on and on and on in sameness in that same unrelieved fashion. She’d never guessed, then, that she’d be looking back on that simple time, the sameness of it, the quiet, with nostalgia and longing. 

She wonders if her luck is running out, if this storm with it’s buffeting gusts, which kept her awake and flinching all night, is only the first of immovable obstacles laid in their path. Red never would have been so caught out, and by something as mundane as the weather, if she hadn’t been distracting him, becoming the albatross around his neck. She looks at him, talking with Moss, sees the tension around his eyes, the unease in him when he doesn’t think anyone is looking. She wonders how badly she’s weighing him down.

The weather service predicts the storm will blow itself out by the end of the day, but the roads will need to be cleared, and the pilot will likely prefer to wait until the next day so as not to begin an overnight transatlantic flight without having a chance to rest up. It’s not likely to be a lengthy delay, and they’re comfortable, warm and protected among friends. She still feels the tension catching up with her, the small rabbit-hearted sense of predation beating down on her in being asked to hold still before the hunt. They are trapped between storm and the march of their enemies with no way to truly predict the immediate movements of either.

**

She retreats back to the sitting room of their suite and settles on the beautifully modern but ungiving sofa which faces the snowed-in view. She has a book she’d picked up in one of the coffee shops they’d stopped in, a few days back. It’s something about the creeping dissatisfaction of the bored housewife and the smallness of small town america, and she reads it with a sharp hunger that’s likely reversed from the author’s intentions.

She peers around the protagonist’s disappointment and unfulfilled promise for glimpses of her children’s little voices, and little hands clutching crayons and lunch boxes, for the visions of nightly routines and Sunday roast dinners with nosy in-laws and a gaggle of cousins, for the football game on the television and the thick pile carpet underfoot like it’s some kind of mythical place. A domestic valhalla for strange little foundling children who find over and over again they are made of the wrong blood and bone, wearing the mark of the wrong fate for opaque, sweet ordinariness.

She flips through the book, ignoring the narrative thrust and gnawing lightly on her thumb, a persistent tightness in her throat. This is what she used to do whenever she and Tom were having a rough patch -- which was more often than she used to be willing to admit -- back before everything. She would picture the fantasy, remind herself what her complicated marriage would eventually evolve into with time and practice and love. 

It used to comfort her, make her feel safe and warm and secure, hopefully for better days. Then it became a kind of ritual of shame and longing, watching dumb movies and reading bad novels to bring to life that imaginary home and that imaginary family that she kept tucked away inside, something that grounded her through the tumult of working on Red’s list, and the growing fear she harbored of her husband. Somehow it reassured her even though it caused her pain, and became entrenched in her reactions to stress, the brightness and profundity of that hope and the sharp, teeth-aching sting of that impossibility — just as when she’d been a girl, picturing the vibrant, toilsome, glamorous life of her figmentary mother, the prima ballerina, to ease her through those long, grey winters full of lonely afternoons and hard-eye schoolmates. A taste of an impossible future to ease the impossible present.

Now though that bittersweet hope only rings bitter to her, with no sweetness to buoy her, something about it has gone chilling and rancid. It seems wrong now, with the reawakened memory of blood on her hands. But mostly it seems wrong because of that summer she tries so hard to pretend never happened, and the autumn that followed with it’s specters that wouldn’t leave her in peace. After the ways she had used the burning of those lost hopes as fuel, and betrayed herself all of her own free will.

**

She couldn’t just let Tom die, that spring, and she couldn’t pull the trigger on him either. She hadn’t been capable, although the impulse had been there. She’d lied through her teeth to save him, to drag him to help. She had left him in capable hands to go continue lying to the FBI, to Red, leaving Tom long enough that he had dragged himself off on his own, whether to die alone like a feral cat or to recuperate on his own, she hadn’t known for two months.

She really had kept the secret for weeks and weeks. Red hadn’t realized that Tom was alive. He’d kept coming around with care and concern, trying to coax her to externalize her feelings, trying to help her grieve. She’d hardly been able to look him in the face.

And then Tom came around, knocked on the door of her motel room late one night, looming up out of the dark as tall and lean as ever, and leaner — haggard even, with fever bright eyes that stared and a hard, pinched mouth. He was a stranger, and he frightened her, though she recognized his gait, the sloped set of his shoulders, the way he leaned in a curve into his sharp elbows and hands stuffed into his pockets, a pose she used to find boyish and sincere. 

She’d half thought she was dreaming, the shock of it allowed him leave to push himself into the motel room. He’d stunk of brine and sweat. She’d started shaking, but she hadn’t drawn her weapon. She was afraid to introduce violence into the encounter, remembering how hard he hit, how much taller and stronger he was, how she was the one who’d shot him, even though she’d been the one to bring him to help, to see him saved.

She’d demanded he leave, that he run and never come back. She told him she could have the full weight of the FBI on him in minutes, but he knew she was lying. He couldn’t really read her like an open book, as he’d claimed, but common sense would have told him as much. She’d lied, she’d kept him a secret, she couldn’t call on backup from the agency she’d lied to without also risking herself.

He’s promised intel. _I’ll help you get berlin,_ he’d said, _he wants me dead now too. Keep me safe from Reddington and I’ll help you. And then I’ll go. When it’s safe, when I have the money to get away. That’s all I ever want, Liz. To get away and have a normal life._

_You know me, Liz,_ he’d said over and over, and she’d felt sick but somehow it had made sense, _You’ll see, Liz, I never meant to hurt you._

She’d agreed, because it was easier than fighting, because it was reflex, because it was 2am and she was tired and sad and the smell of him made her nauseous and if she said yes, he would be happy and easy and biddable — that was how it had always been between them, saying yes to him was the only thing that had brought happiness and ease. She’d agreed because she’d caused him to keep living and now she felt the weight of his life on her hands, as though it was a responsibility she had to continue to uphold. And she’d wanted the intel. She’d wanted to grab for the brass ring of having the upper hand for once in Red’s information bartering.

He didn’t come around regularly, at first. Tom was an easy secret to keep. She couldn’t tell the team because she’d reported him dead, and she couldn’t be caught out in the lie. She couldn’t tell Red because of the look she’d seen in Red’s eyes, the disgust she’d seen when Tom had held her between them with a gun to her head. 

She couldn’t even picture how he would look at her if he knew she’d defied him, saved her despicable husband and then allied herself with him. Even though she was terrified of being completely consumed by Red’s influence, to the point where she was willing to make a deal with the devil, the idea of facing his disappointment, his disgust, was more awful than she could stand to think about.

The second time Tom had appeared, again in the middle of the night, she’d demanded answers. She railed, and berated, asked all the hows and whys. Asked how much money he’d made in leading her on. Asked how long he’d planned to stay after they adopted a baby, it’s first birthday? it’s second? none at all?

He’d been sullen and unresponsive, told her she’d eaten it up eagerly and asked for more. Told her that you can’t live with someone for three years and have every second be a lie. Told her she was hardly a dream to live with, and just as much of a liar, a cheat, a thief as he was. Told her that his name was once Jacob and that was the only part of his past that mattered.

She’d wallowed through the next humid, miserable days in a haze of grief and confusion, as though seeing Tom in the dead of night had awakened some well of anger and unquenchable hurt inside her that had lain dormant for months since that last confrontation at their old house. She wanted him to pay for his cruel vitriol and superiority, but she also wanted to undo what was done, wanted to believe any of their little life was real.

**

There was intel. Enough of it to keep Red alive when he was about to trade himself for his lost wife. Enough to make her feel for a while that she could match her will against Red, although she was too nervous to let him close enough to do battle. He could already smell the sea-brine stink of lies on her.

Tom had started showing up more and more frequently, and offering less and less, still looking ill and ratty and long haired, and dwarfed by a bulky, dingy grey hoodie. The mutual deal of information for the keeping of the secret — a few minutes of him talking about how he wanted to change which she withstood in exchange for some vague and uncertain kind of assurance that Tom wasn’t out there wrecking havoc on her watch — that had been struck in the sticky summer had shifted as the days finally began to cool. He showed up more frequently, but he was also far less forthcoming, stalling for time, pushing for her attention, trying to reminisce what he called their happier days while dancing around her questions. Like he was trying to reconnect. Like he thought that he was building a friendship, while she thought she was trapped in a slowly tightening knot of obligations from which she had no idea how to extract herself.

She’d watched a lot of bad movies then, no energy even to work when she got home to her motel room. She’d sit in bed and revisit the little life she had pictured building with Tom and their kid, trying to understand how the illusion had been enough to blind her to the self-satisfaction and endless indifference of the man she’d married. She’d picture him off away and long gone, replaced. She would picture, instead, a time that was somehow after Red and the List, after she had learned to stop caring about her past, with a faceless and largely unimportant and invisible new partner, a family, a life with work days that ended in time for homework and dinner and bedtime stories. 

It was a hazier hope than ever, sheer fantasy and she’d known it, built on the need to believe that she wouldn’t always be this violent, despairing, fearful wreck of a woman. She’d allowed herself to wallow in it, to help pass the time in the lonely and unbearable nights of not sleeping and avoiding Red’s calls that had made up her autumn. She’d had to believe that there was any kind of after, had tried so hard imagine that there could be a time when the course of her life might yet correct itself, that she would still be able to steer it back to where she wanted to be given time and will. 

She’d clung to that idea until the last of her hope dried up and blew away in the face of the fulcrum, her mother’s identity, her father’s villainy, the Cabal, and Tom Connelly sneering down at her, another man who’d thought he had her and could bend her to his schemes, who thought he could take from her her only true thing. When she’d struck out into the dark, on the run, that hope was as dead as the men she’d killed, but the longing had survived, vicious and nestled deep within.

**

After Tom had shared the banking information that saved Red, he’d felt that he was owed a celebratory meal together, like old times, he’d said. And when she’d said turned him down, in that same tired voice as a hundred other missed dinners, it had felt so familiar and so excoriating and strange that he could still expect and not see how she’d been harmed. 

The he’d asked for money, just a little loan. He’d been squatting on this awful unseaworthy wreck of a boat in the marina and he wanted a shitty little motel room like hers instead. She’d told him off and turned him out.

But the next day she’d gone to the marina and tracked him down, skulking around until she found his hideout. She caught the eye of the harbormaster patrolling the area and had to talk fast and flash her badge, hand over her card. She still couldn’t reveal that Tom was alive and that she knew where he was or her career would be over. The man had walked on in the end, easily convinced.

She’d wanted to see if Tom was telling the truth, see where he’d been living. She was alarmed by the level of squalor he seemed able to withstand, but her guilt at feeling glad to see him suffer had already gotten to her. She gave him a wad of cash out of their old joint checking account, money he had earned at that school. Told him she had saved him because he was useful, and he couldn’t be useful if he died of pneumonia living on the streets.

She left the marina wondering what he could have been teaching those poor fourth graders, and what on earth the school had thought in hiring him. She forgot all about the harbor master. 

**

 

The next time Tom had shown up, he’d had a haircut, and a shower, and had bought a new-looking jacket and a nice wool scarf. He looked more like her husband, the character he used to play, than he had in months. 

She’d been drunk off most a bottle of acidic wine from the americanized Italian bistro where she’d bought her dinner. She hadn’t seen Red in three days, and the last time she’d seen him was to have a fight about her getting her babysitter Ezra arrested, and the time before that he’d been in a good mood, had shared with her his friend and contact, and she’d basked for about twenty minutes in the old camaraderie before being overcome with feeling of sinking guilt at her subterfuge. Her hand and it’s stitches were throbbing where she’d cut it for her ruse with Doctor Creel.

She’d ambled to the door, thinking maybe, maybe it was Red. She’d been dreaming lately, some nights, of Tom looming up at the door, until he was chased chased away by Red. Sometimes Red shot him. Sometimes Red made her hold the gun. Mostly, he simply made Tom vanish by the logic of dreams, as though his presence was so big that it forced the scraggled ghost of her husband out of existence. 

But she’d opened the door and it was Tom. Again. Not a dream, not scrawny and dirty, but looking like the grade school teacher who’d lived with her, who had cooked dinner for her, who had lied and lied and tried to start a family with her. Who had come home to christmas and thanksgiving and Sam’s birthday for three years with her and charmed her father, and her aunt and uncle. 

Tom had looked at her with his raised eyebrows and his strange little smile. She’d started crying, for no reason that she could discern, except that she was drunk and sad and confused. He’d reached out to comfort her, smelling clean but nothing like she remembered, and she’d gone still as a startled woodland creature. Her skin had recoiled but her muscles hadn’t listened, her mind going still with grief and unspent, unspendable fury, retreating inwards to what was familiar.

 _We’re newlyweds,_ he’d said once, and reached for her body to test the extent of her disloyalty and what indignities she would allow. She’d acquiesced because that was what she did, what she’d always done, used sex to apologize to him, to ask for forgiveness, to earn her way back into his good graces when his hurt and oppressive coldness made her feel sick and small and hopeless for too long. 

He had reached for her to punish her that day, so as she gasped and stumbled through tears, she reached for him, to punish them both. 

He was eager. He didn’t question it. She felt like she was watching herself from a great distance and she’d never in her life hated anyone so much as that woman and that man mauling each other on that bed, dry-eyed and far too familiar. Before he’d even caught his breath, she’d shoved him off her and scrambled back, pulling her knees to her chest with one arm, the other scrabbling under her pillow for her gun.

 _Is that what you wanted,_ she’d asked, wailed, demanded of him, watched his face fall and heard the high, hysterical sound of her voice. That’s what you’ve been after right? Us, reconciling, us, rutting like animals, it’s hard to tell which isn’t it? Well, you got what you wanted.

He’d looked shocked, back-footed, made placating noises and gestures that hadn’t sunk in because her head was full of a dull tinnitus. He’d put his hands on her arms, to calm her, and she’d leveled her gun at him, thumbing the safety off. He’d jerked back at that, looking genuinely scared, started pulling on his clothes, those of them which had been stripped off in the first place.

 _Get out,_ she’d shrieked, sounding drunk and unhinged, like the kind of woman who belonged in a cheap motel having sex with a murder on dirty sheets. 

_What the fuck is wrong with you?_ he’d demanded, and she’d been proud of how shocked he was, how scared, she remembered that clearly.

 _Get out, you got what you wanted, you win, okay, you win, I give, I always give— but get out!_ she’d gone on shrieking, gun steady on him until he left, even though everything else in her had been shaking.

She’d very, very carefully put down her service weapon on the bedside table. Then she’d launched out of bed and stripped the sheets and pillows from the bed, leaving them wadded on the floor with the bedspread, kicked them viciously towards the door. Stood in the shower until the water ran cold. Slept in wet hair and sweats, curled on the bare mattress. 

She went to work the next day, like nothing had happened, all neat and made up and professional. She spoke evenly with Ressler and Aram and kept her head down. She blamed the feeling of tears welling in her chest and tickling in her throat on the lingering hangover. It didn’t happen, she told herself, it hadn’t happened, it was just another dream. But Red hadn’t come to chase him away. It couldn’t have been a dream.

She had avoided Red for days. Had never told him of that night, even when the truth had come out and he’d used Tom to get to Berlin. Had tried to, almost, asking why she just kept going along with it, what was wrong with her, but Red had called it love, had held her sweetly and let her cry, seemed to think her something good and right, not full of poison and weakness and vitriol. 

She’d cried harder and didn't tell him.

**

Tom had disappeared after Berlin was dead. She’d thought it was done. She’d thought she was free. She’d thought that maybe the open, aching wound of her marriage might at last be allowed to heal.

Then she’d found out that she was Red’s only link to his great weapon against his enemies, and she’d been devastated, couldn’t help but view his every attention through the lens of what use she could be to him. Then she was accused of the murder of the harbormaster, the murder of an innocent man that Tom had committed with the second chance she’d bought him, risking everything to do so. Then Red dragged her husband back from wherever he’d been by the scruff of the neck in the hopes that she would not stand trial for a murder Tom had committed, and in the process dragging both Tom’s and the Cabal’s attention back onto her.

She’s moved motels three times since the night she’d taken Tom to her bed, but he still showed up at her door after the Cabal pulled strings to get him off for the murder charge. The one for which they would have been happy to see her hang. 

Tom looked different again, his frame was bulkier, his hair was shorn, he wore a very expensive wool coat and designer jeans and wore a fine, astringent cologne like some kind of dead-eyed trust fund boy. Even his posture was different, nothing like the slouching school teacher, the comic book reading hipster who’d lived with her and demanded they go gluten free. He’d gone all taught and edgy, not fidgety exactly, but ready to react.

Her gut reacted to him looking this way. A little bit like attraction but mostly like she needed to know where the exits were at all times. Mostly like she could look at him and tell he was a predator, instead of only knowing what he was from experience. She’d had no idea what to say to him, had said nothing at all.

He’d apologized for disappearing, said he didn’t think she wanted him around anymore, that he’d no way of knowing that the police would look to her over Ames. Told her she’d scared him, the way she was acting when he was with her last, that he was worried about her.

 _That man had a family,_ she’d said, ignoring everything, all of the pantomime humble charm. _He was an innocent man, he was just doing his job. What possible reason did you have to kill him?_

_I did what I had to, he’d said, and then, there’s no such thing as an innocent man. And what about Reddington, you forgive him so easily these days, but you really think he’s never killed a cop who was about to bring him in?_

she’d frozen at that, unable to fathom such a thing, wanting to leap to Red’s defense and then remembering how cruelly she’d been used. She’d refused to engage with him on that track.

 _Ames wasn’t a threat to you! He couldn’t have possibly known who you were!_ she’d yelled instead. 

_I was trespassing, he was bringing me in, going to call in backup. The second they got me finger printed, I would have been bundled off to one of your government interrogation sites. You got me in the system, Liz, remember? That time you had me hauled in with a hood on my head?_

_He wouldn’t have brought you in for trespassing, just sent you on your way,_ she’d said slowly, _What else were you doing that night?_

But he hadn’t answered. He’d asked her to get his passports back from evidence, and he’d never darken her door again, if that was what she wanted. She agreed because she didn’t want him to be able to read her refusal as a message that she wanted him around, but she was worried that he’d take her agreement to help as just the same. At least this answer had sent him away quiet and tame.

**

Her relationship with Red was in ruins, then, she’d hardly been able to look at him without a sting in her skin, an ache in her chest. She had the fulcrum, she thought sure she could bend him to her will, if she could ever shore herself up enough to press her advantage. But she couldn’t, she treasured the power that the fulcrum gave her, but the thought that he, too, had been using her all this time was paralyzing, completely overwhelming in ways she didn’t, in all her experience and training, have words for.

And then there had been the apartment. That beautiful, safe, sweeping, clean and well lit apartment in her name. She’d never wanted anything so badly her whole life, longed to be able to call it hers with a fury like a fever, and had never, never felt more hurt by one gesture. He’d dangled that sweet, private luxury in front of her, knowing she mistrusted him, and it had been so clear to her then that it was an awful bribe that she couldn’t keep without being pulled down under his control.

She’d tried twice to refuse the key, return it to Red, but he hadn’t even acknowledged her words. And there was Ames’s daughter to consider, the fatherless young woman whose life she’d helped to destroy. So she’d put the apartment up for sale, visited it just once, furtive and defiant against the blandly curious gaze of the man at the front desk. She’d looked in every room and then left, winded as if she’d been training hand to hand for hours.

She didn’t remember much else about that night, besides coming back to her motel, it’s dirty, claustrophobic walls and ugly green carpet and finding herself sobbing and sobbing until she could hardly breath. How could anyone be so hateful, she wondered, to offer something she wanted so much when he also had to have known she could ever accept. It had felt like a taunt, like he wanted to remind her how little she had, how much he could offer if she would just play along, or maybe like he was trying to pay off some debt of life he’d felt after she’d stopped Yamaani from killing him. 

It had felt like proof that he wanted to buy her off to get what he wanted, like he’d broken what was left of their trust. She congratulated herself on refusing to fall prey to it. She’d marched herself through the process of signing off on the sale with stern detachment and reminded herself of the debt she owed to Ames’s daughter, which Tom was never going to repay.

And it was into these doldrums and days of resentment and denied longing that Tom inserted himself, begging one more favor and one more, hovering about her with the familiar, hollow expressions of concern and whispered aspersions against Red, against all of it. 

He used the reflective listening method, she could see it clearly by then, mirroring back her own moods and fears for her approval. He wasn’t even very careful about it, too eager to push, too used to her immediate acquiescence, but it had been so familiar. So terribly, wonderfully familiar, and she didn’t have to think, hardly even had to say anything because he would spin out whole conversations on his own, playing both their parts for her. All she had to do was follow along with a nod or a frown, let her head fill up with fog and white noise, let him admit for her how she was on the brink of despair. 

It was like being drugged, like floating along half in dream, like forcing her own head under the water and lingering and lingering. It dragged at her, made her dizzy and slow, but it filled some of her evenings, letting Tom talk to her. It filled some of the quiet, empty endlessness that seemed to be settling around her. It wasn’t the looming, hollow concavity of what her life would be without Red once she finally finally gave over the fulcrum, it wasn’t the bone-deep ring of fear, so she let it go on.

And sometimes she could almost believe he cared, not a lot, not much, but enough that he wouldn’t try to get revenge for the night she’d dragged him to her bed, the day she’d shot him in the gut. She’d never have to really trust Tom or truly listen to him, just let him go on making the same white noise, the echo chamber of her half-voiced hopes and fears reflected back, nothing too challenging or too liable to make her bleed. Sometimes she was able to believe he’d grown fond of her in their years together, had learned to endure her with some generosity the way she’d learned to endure him.

To think so made it easier to live with herself, in any case.

**

She dreams of Tom, still, far more often than she’d like. They’re awful dreams, when he’s on top of her and his hands are hard as iron and he hold her down. Or sometimes he only puts his hands around her neck and taunts her, squeezes until she wakes gasping and panting, often finding herself already pacing the room. 

She has a lot of bad dreams. Some are full of her bleeding, or full of Red bleeding, which is infinitely worse. Sometimes it’s Red kneeling at her feet, and a hundred riflemen around them and she has no way to protect him, no way to hold him close enough to ward off all their guns. Some are of how the Senator died after she’d touched him, of how everyone around her did the same, that she is taint and contagion that withers all she sees. Some are hazy things of smoke and flame. But the ones that shake her the most are the ones of Tom, because she knows they’re true, that he hurt her and hurt her, and she allowed it. 

She dreams of Tom that afternoon, laying on that cream linen sofa in that artful sitting room, and she wakes choking and clawing at her own throat. She nearly collides with Red who is hovering, trying to wake her as she bolts up to try and escape, flailing out to cast off the grasp of phantom hands. Her legs don’t hold as she wheels around and Red’s hard grip is what aims her at the coffee table instead of the floor. She moans to herself, a little noise of alarm and shame. Her mind is too muffled with sleep and her body to wracked with shaking to produce any words to explain or send him off so she can recover in peace.

Red says something soothing and soft that she doesn’t entirely track, settles a hand so lightly against her shoulder she can hardly feel it, as if he’s nervous of her reaction.

“I’m fine,” she says, “Just a dream. Sorry, I haven’t had… I didn’t mean to fall asleep out here.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” he says, “honestly, Lizzie. I was worried about you, it seemed like a terrible nightmare. Are you alright? Can I get you something?”

She bends down and picks up the novel she’d dropped in her sleep, probably what she’d tripped on as she’d tried to make her escape, and smooths the cover, sets it aside. Her hands aren’t shaking, but the way she feels inside it seems like they should be. She can’t manage to look up at him just yet, feels like she’s wearing all the things she’s never told him about her and Tom are right on her skin for him to see.

“I’m cold,” is all she says, hunching into herself, feeling her sense of reality reeling between awakeness and dream.

Red steps away for a second and returns with his mushroom colored sweater, left on a nearby chair sometime the night before, helps her pull it over her head. Her chill comes from the mortal fear of her dream rather than the temperature of the room, but she appreciates the gesture. He settles in front of her, perched on the edge of the sofa so that their knees touch, and tries to catch her eye.

“Now, do you want to talk about that?” he asks gently.

“It was just a dream, Red.”

“It didn’t seem like just a dream, to me. Was it about Connelly, and what happened that day?”

“No.”

“Was it…” he hesitates and seems to brace himself, “about the night of the fire? You can ask me about that, you know. There’s need to keep secrets, now that… Now that you’ve remembered what I’d hoped you’d never have to know. Maybe it would feel better to clear the air.”

She shakes her head, emphatic. She doesn’t want to think about that night, doesn’t want to know more. Not yet. “No,” she says, mainly to head him off, not quite thinking, “No, it was about Tom. I’ve had— it’s a nightmare I’ve had for a while. Dreams are meaningless anyway, just the brain processing, reminding you of useless things.”

“Lizzy, I came in here and you were crying like you were... I thought something was terribly wrong. That doesn’t seem meaningless to me.”

She reaches up to rub her eyes, surprised, and yes, he’s right, her cheeks are wet. She swipes at her face with the side of her hand, says nothing. She doesn’t know how to explain that she’s lived fear of her husband’s crushing hands for far longer than she’d been able to see that Tom had a darker purpose in her life, and yet had continued to cling to him. She doesn’t understand it herself, not really. She’d been so desperate to keep her place in Tom’s heart, the place she’d thought she’d had, that she’d been willing to allow _so much_ , and embrace it as her just dues. 

“I spent the night with him,” she says suddenly, in a quiet rush, looking down at her hands.

“Yes, I… I know that, Elizabeth. I had people trying to track you down after the attack on the Senator,” he admits, sounding apologetic, like he expects her to be angry for the breach of privacy, but just at the moment she doesn’t care about that.

“I don’t mean then. Yes, I went to him then, yes, I did, because he made himself available to me. Because I didn’t give a shit if he took me in or ignored me. Because if he cared about me, if he’d learned to love me a little like some kind of—like an awful, horrific romance, then he hadn’t… hurt me. Then I hadn’t let him _hurt_ me and use me while I kept going back for more,” she says, sounding choked, like she can still feel the dream of her husband’s hands around her neck.

“Lizzy…” he says, reaches out to take her hand. But she pulls away, wraps her arms around her middle and stares even more determinedly at the corner of the coffee table, her shoes, avoiding his concerned gaze.

“But I didn’t mean that night. There was… when he was my informant, before Ames and the rest of it. He just kept hanging around. And you and I had… That fall was bad, and I hated you, and me and him, but he was there, pushing his way in every few days and one night I just… I don’t even know why I did it. When I remember, I just—” want to tear my skin off and leave it behind, she thinks, but doesn’t say so, knows even in this state that it’s useless melodrama. 

She scrubs at her face with her hands, tangling her fingers in her bangs, trying to get rid of the image in her mind. She stands up, and paces away from Red. She can hardly believe she’s telling him, but it’s so forcefully present in her mind and she has no one else to tell, no one, and he’s always known the worst of her — from the very beginning he’s known. They say things to each other, she and Red, she thinks, most of their discourse has been showing each other the the darkest, most hideous parts of themselves, the parts they keep hidden and brined and sheltered from prying eyes. And she’s just _so tired_ of keeping the secret. 

She wants to get away from the reality of him knowing this, though. She doesn’t want to see it settle in his face. 

“I keep dreaming about it,” she says dully, “But it’s different. He’s trying to kill me. Suffocate me. And the worst part is that I always think that it’s inevitable. That it’s what I agreed to, without realizing it maybe, but it’s binding just the same.”

“ _None_ of it is what you agreed to, surely you know that,” Red says, sounding winded, sounding like he’s not sure how to speak to her anymore — just as she’d always feared when deciding he shouldn’t know.

“Hmm. Didn’t I?” she says, scathing and venomous, “I knew what he was and I kept inviting him back. I kept him alive. I let him hang around. That sounds a lot like I deserved whatever I got.”

“No, Lizzie. _No._ There is _no universe_ where that’s true, do you understand me?” He sounds outraged now, and wounded. 

And closer, she’d heard him get up, probably he’s come nearer. She doesn’t turn to look. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t think it’s true, doesn’t think the world works that way. She’s sure she’s earned everything that was done to her by her own incapabilities and misdeeds.

“He said once that I was his greatest triumph,” she says instead, fiddling with the meaningless bric-a-brac on the table before the window where she stood. “I guess I was. Multiple degrees, fully certified in reading people for a living, and he still had me.”

“I don’t understand how you can think like this,” Red says, his voice different than she’s used to, strained and weak with more of that wounded outrage, like she’s hurting him. “You’re so clever, Lizzie, and educated, and capable… How can you think you’re responsible for Tom’s actions? He made his own choices and for everything he’s done, _he’s the only one to blame._ Not you. Not even because you didn’t want him dead or hauled into a blacksite prison sans habeas corpus for the rest of his miserable life.”

“Don’t hector me about this, Red. It isn’t fair.”

“I’m not hectoring, sweetheart, I’m just trying to tell you the truth,” he says, from somewhere behind her shoulder, “Please, listen to me. It’s such an overwhelming burden you’re trying to take on, and it isn’t even yours. You are culpable for his actions, not because you let him in your life, not because you found mercy for him. _Nothing_ Tom has done is your fault.”

She shrugged and tugged the sleeves of his soft sweater over her hands. It’s darkening already, out on the mountainside, and the fine snow still swirls. The light is so blue and white and velvet and low, with no lamps lit in their sitting room. She can almost feel it against her skin, along with the cold which radiates faintly from the window glass.

If she hadn’t brought it on herself, she thinks, then he did it for no reason, lied and tricked and blamed her and used her body just because he could. Not even for a job, she thinks, not really. The job would have required him to keep her close, but not… all the rest. She’s not sure if she can cope with that.

“Why are we even talking about this?” she says, suddenly impatient, wanting to suck it all back in like a tape rewinding. At least she hasn’t cried since she woke up, she thinks. “Why did I even tell you? It’s all so humiliating.”

“None of this is shameful,” he says, “All I hear you telling me is how you tried to find some sense of control over your situation in the face of unimaginable betrayal. I don’t think that’s humiliation, I think it’s fighting to survive.”

“I don’t want to think about him anymore, or dream about him anymore,” she says, turning at last to face him. “I just wanted to be out of the country… I think I’ve been looking forward to leaving Tom behind than the Cabal and the rest of it. I thought, maybe if we went far enough...”

She laughs faintly at herself, dull and pained, tries on an ironic smile that’s so strained it hurts. Red winces slightly to see it, she can see it in the corners of his eyes. He gives her a sad little smile just the same, all soft about the mouth and warm around the eyes. His eyes always seemed so wonderfully alive, she thought, and wondered when she’d come to think of that as a rarity, a marvel. In this light, his skin seems to glow. He always forgives her, and she wonders how it’s possible.

“We’ll be on our way soon, Lizzie, I promise you. One more night and we’ll leave this country behind. As for the other,” he says, and shakes his head slightly, “If there’s an antidote for dreams in this world, I haven’t found it, though I’d pay for it a fortune and a half.”

“Yes,” she says, takes note of the weariness, the muted longing in his voice, “Yes, I guess you would, wouldn’t you. You knew a guy who changes DNA, but not a guy for nightmares.”

“I’ve heard it said that dreams keep us sane, that without dreams we’d begin to fail to recognize what’s real and what isn’t. But there are times I find myself thinking that the opposite is true.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad if I could wake up and say to myself, ‘that didn’t happen, it wasn’t real.’ I’d get nightmares working hard cases in my profiling days, and I could just brush them off,” she says, “But now they’re so close to the things I just want to forget.”

She watches regret play over Red’s face, settling in a soft frown, a dipped chin. “I’m so sorry, Lizzie,” he says.

“We did alright on the road, though, didn’t we,” she says, and then worried that it sounded like a hint when it wasn’t — exactly.

“We did. It was remarkable. Like a ceasefire,” he says, “If you figure out how we managed it, you’ll have to tell me.”

She isn’t sure if he’s teasing or not, or maybe playing obtuse. She looks at him a little askance and he merely looks concerned so she doesn’t think he is. I just want the sound of your breathing in the same room, she thinks and finds no ability to voice the thought, it makes the nights just enough less oppressive and grotesque. She blinks up at him, the words sticking in her throat.

“One more night,” he says again, and goes to turn on a lamp, to fend off the blackening blue dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry. I just. Liz's life has been so full of awful things, and it's necessary to look at those things close up and deal with them instead of shoving them off into the ether. It's necessary for context, and for contrast with the present. I also felt like i couldn't carry the story forward without expressing my irreconcilable differences with S2.0 But all the same, I'm sorry. I expected this to be a nice, cuddly little story, and it developed teeth. Hope it's still to your liking, Ashlene. And now that this has been introduced, they can move forward together, processing and being honest. Happier chapters to come, i promise.


	7. seven (suffusion)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Big Conversation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few things I have to address here, kids. First off I want to say how much I've valued your readership and support of this fic, and sticking with me even though we took a trip through murky waters last time out. Second, I want to say that this is a much more lighthearted venture. Third, I want to let you know that this little gift "ficlet" has grown (or rather my estimation of how many words it will take me to say what i want to say has grown) and so I've realized that it can't all fit in the same story. This is the last full chapter of _Blame Me, I Will Wear It_ , but please expect the epilogue by the end of the week, and it's sequel _Younger Than We've Ever Been_ is already underway and is a direct continuation (of equal size, if I'm honest with myself) so this is not the end! But the first leg of their journey is drawing to a close, all the same. Thank you, and let me know what you think!

She ambles blankly through the rest of the winter evening, lost in the murky state which follows strong emotion and awakening from unplanned sleep. Red is not unaffected by the gravity of her mood, and all he has just learned about the depth to which she’d sunk that autumn, but he covers it better. He has practice, she knows that, and he’s scrupulous about playing his role as proxy and protector between her and their host. She’s grateful he’s there to take the reigns.

Dinner with Moss is a quiet, strained affair. Calhoun doesn’t press or pester her, doesn’t question Red, but he seems aware there’s something in the atmosphere and tries to offset it with brief outbursts of forced joviality and retreats into cautious silence when even Red doesn’t do much to carry it along. Instead Red shoots her periodic concerned glances and talks in soothing, gentle tones as though she has a headache rather than a case of morbid regret. She, overwhelmingly, wishes that she and Red were alone so they could eat a little and retreat to slow, familiar silence or maybe drink themselves silly over thoughtless commiseration — the way they’d done on and off nearly from the first weeks of their association — without the social awkwardness of an unfamiliar third in their midst. She makes the best of it.

Soon enough the plates are cleared, and Red and Calhoun head off to the expansive seating area, to allow Calhoun to show off some new components in his hifi system, a preamp that some reclusive artisan has produced for him after two years of prodding. (“We initially bonded over similar music tastes, Lizzie,” Red tells her, “and Cal has a setup that would make a grown man weak in the knees.”) She considers the quiet and solitude of her own room, and the latent presence of sleeplessness and nightmares that await her there and she reluctantly trails after them instead. 

Red has sprawled himself deeply into the corner of the expansive sectional, and reaches out his arm to her in a gesture of invitation. She glances over at Moss who is over by the far wall and fussing with a stereo system excavated from discrete cabinetry and decides it won’t do any harm to follow her impulse. She tucks herself up against Red’s side for the duration, allows him and Moss draw her to give opinions on the samplings of music he plays, learning bits and pieces of stereo-phile sound jargon obligingly but without real fascination. 

As if sensing her interest waning, after a time Red requests something and Moss obliges. They settle in under the sound of warm, round jazz that would have been nostalgic to these men’s fathers, both vibrant and lulling. At some point she pushes up her sleeves, growing warm and relaxed, and realizes that she’s still wearing Red’s sweater, the same one he’d worn the day before. She wonders what their host thinks is between them for a few squirming seconds, but dismisses it as irrelevant. She lets her head fall back against the sofa, and settle against the firm upper curve of Red’s arm as if by accident.

Calhoun, who is the sort of man who talks a good game playing the artistic temperament yet always gets his eight hours of sleep and gets up early to exercise, sits up chatting with them, with increasing drowsy disjointedness, the length of another few records and then falls quiet. The inveterate insomniacs have outlasted the pretender, and he excuses himself to bed with apologies.

“Feel free to keep playing,” he invites, “and don’t worry about disturbing me, once I’m out I sleep like the dead.”

Once Moss had left them, she was terribly conscious that it was getting late, that she was not even an ounce tired enough to sleep, that she wanted to sit up with Red until she was ready to drift off, the whole night if necessary, though he would likely try to send her off to bed. She was also acutely aware, not for the first time on one of their evenings together, that if he were someone else, if he were a normal sort of man she was seeing, this would be the moment when the mood of the night would shift. This would be the moment for soft words and warm hands cradling her ribcage. But Red was not any other man and the long and storied tangle of their history — though the greater portion of that balance hung on his side not hers, to her he was still oftentimes a new and astonishing marvel — created a gulf between them that seemed to preclude even the possibility of that simple, human discourse between man and woman. She feels the sterile concavity of it’s lack in the atmosphere like a ringing lonely pall, and she sighs heavily, tipping her head back to stare at the dim spangles of the scattered lights hung among the high rafters as the record drifts to it’s cracking end.

“Everything alright?” he asks, hearing her sigh, feeling her sink away from him on the sofa.

She shrugs faintly, shakes her head dismissively. He hoists his way away from from her and up, goes to turn the album over with practiced ease. She watches him set the tone arm with a bitten lip, realizing how every shape and posture of his silhouette is familiar and precious to her. She would know him anywhere, she supposes, by the angle of his bent head, the way he shifts his weight with such ease over one hip. How strange it is to know someone so well, she thinks, and under these circumstances, when she’d expected him to remain always the biggest mystery in the world. 

Red stands and looks down at her with a dark, unreadable look for a while when he comes back, perhaps wondering about the tenor of her lapse into silence. She makes room for him to reclaim his corner, but somehow once they’re settled again, she’s much closer than before, pressed fully against his side from shoulder to knee. He drapes his arm along her shoulders to accommodate her, almost as if out of reflex. He seems vaguely startled by this occurrence and so does she, and for what seems an eternal age they simply look at each other in deep silence.

“Do you ever think about what it would be like,” she says softly, “if we had just… met? Not as FBI agent and asset—“

“Criminal, you mean,” he says, wryly.

“Well, yes, but it seems petty to say so now. But if we’d just met at a… party, or struck up a conversation at a coffee shop, and started from there.”

“Given how well you responded to me when we first met, I assume I would have annoyed you to distraction within twenty minutes, and our acquaintance would have been brief at best,” he says, still wry, not quite taking her seriously.

“No… no, that’s not how it would go at all,” she says, frustrated, wanting him to picture it with her, wanting him to see how different, how good this alternate life that was barred from them could have been, “I used to have to fight so hard not to be utterly charmed by you. I can’t believe you didn’t know. It was only because of what you’d done, who your file said you were supposed to be, that I was able to refrain from dissolving into a puddle of girlish… anyway, I think we would have been friends, I think we would have been close.”

“And then when you found out who I really was you would have been so furious, so devastated,” he says, thinking he understands what she’s getting at, “I could never have done that to you, Lizzie. Better to let you see the worst of it from the very beginning.”

“I don’t mean, if you’d lied. Picture it, if you’d lived an ordinary life up ’til then, if you were an admiral or something, a storied professor of, I don’t know, anthropology who traveled the world, and I was just a regular detective or a regular therapist, and we’d met and…”

“And I’d swept you off your feet?” he says, with a smile that isn’t wry at all but poignant. 

“Yes.” 

She’s staggeringly aware of his fingers sliding and tangling through the hair at the base of her skull, but she isn’t sure that he is, so she stays very still and tries not to startle him into withdrawing.

“Just a couple of ordinary, everyday people, like Jack and Sarah, living their lives together,” he poses, not quite a question.

“Yes, just like them.”

“If I were really like him, I think you’d be bored of me by now.”

“Never. Absolutely not,” she says with vehemence, and then smiles at him, proud and teasing and hopes it comes across as nonchalance, “it’s impossible to find you boring, even if you didn’t… have to do what you do for a living.”

“I would be just a fussy, old man set in his ways without my life of crime,” he says with disbelief, a shake of his head, “Hardly much to keep a brilliant, vibrant young woman entertained.”

“Don’t be so self-deprecating, it isn’t flattering and you don’t deserve it.”

“We were neither of us bound for an ordinary life, Lizzie,” he says, going serious, his voice going so soft and low she can’t help but lean in, “I can’t see either of us thriving that way, belabored and bound by custom, stultifying in inaction, without the balsamic tang of fear and wonder and reality stripped bare of it’s sanitized wrappings. If we were just two people in an ordinary life I think we might have torn each other apart for lack of anything else to tear.”

“I don’t think so. Maybe we wouldn’t be so likely to want to tear things in the first place.”

“Maybe. It’s difficult to say. I’ve been living this way for so long, Lizzie…” he says, he voice rough and regretful, as though she were drawing him towards something to which he didn’t want to be drawn, but was, inexorably.

“But don’t you think that ordinary people can love each other just as well, just as much, maybe even better because they wouldn’t always be wrapping themselves up to ward off the next excruciating thing, bracing for the calamity. They could be more open, they could invite more. They wouldn’t be so paralyzed.” She hears herself speaking hushed and impassioned, as if she’s near to tears, or a declaration of some kind. She feels caught up in something, she just wants Red to see how much she feels she’s been denied, the shape of it, the warmth.

“You don’t think there are ordinary calamities in everyone’s lives? That there could be vulnerability and self-preservation between any two people, that their fears could feel just as large?” he says gently, “I don’t like to think of the life I might have led, if I’d made some other choice for a path that was simpler and less deadly, that’s what’s paralyzing. And anyway, if I were an average professor of anthropology and you were an average detective, how would we have met? How would we have even gotten a chance to become anything at all? It’s such a strange and circuitous twist of fate that cast us together in the first place… No, Lizzie, this is the life where we met, this is the life I think about.”

“I would have been stuck in Russia, anyway, wouldn’t I? I never would have even heard of you,” she says, somewhat nonsensically, and feels her face crumple, teetering on the brink of tears at the bereftness of it, the bareness of the sweet hypothetical. Even in a world without fire and death, the still would not have been happy, she thinks.

“Oh, Lizzie,” he says and gathers her close, his fingers dig in against her shoulder, her waist and she curls herself in to him until her crown is tucked under his jaw, her nose burrowing into the humid warmth of the space between his shirt collar and skin, squeezing here eyes tight as though braced for impact. “Sweetheart. How much of that wine did you have, anyway?”

She gives a little huff and feels him tense and shift slightly in response. She gives herself room to breathe, settling her head against the couch cushion above his shoulder instead, but somehow this means sprawling almost entirely across Red’s lap. His hands steady her, she can feel the tension in his arms as he pulls her down beside him, across him.

“Not much. I wasn’t in the mood. I’m not drunk, Red. I’m just… I wish it was easier. You and I. It’s always such a long, horrible fight to get to a place where we can just say things to each other. Like we have to relearn it every time, and each time we do it get’s harder to do. I’m just so tired. I don’t want it to be like that for us, I don’t want it to be that difficult anymore.”

“I am trying. You may not believe me, given how I’ve acted. I haven’t been fair to you, and I’m so sorry for that, Lizzie. I don’t know how to make it easier, if I could…” he says softly, “It’s not in my nature to trust people, not anymore. For so long all I could focus on was proving and maintaining my value to you. It’s the only way I know to build alliances in this world. But an alliance… that’s so cold, so mercenary, so inadequate. It didn’t do justice to either of us. ”

“Why couldn’t you have just told me?” she says, pained, lamenting, “Why couldn’t you have just said ‘this is hard for me too, but I care and I’m trying?’ You made it seem like had it all figured out. You made it so easy to think you were just playing me, and you didn’t even try to contradict me when I said— when I accused you of awful things.”

Red is still and quiet under her, but he’s so tense that it seems to her like he’s vibrating. She worries she’s gone too far, pushed him beyond what he can stand in one night, but those months of fearing and believing in his indifference still weigh on her, still hurt her even though she understands that her understanding at that time was as false and distorted as a funhouse mirror. She presses her cheek against his shoulder and hopes that he understands.

“I don’t know,” he says at last, a bewildered whisper, he sounds lost as a lonely little boy, “I haven’t treated you fairly, Lizzie. There is no excuse, but it’s… I haven’t tried to learn how to be open and present with a wholly new person like this, with you, in twenty years. It’s… it’s terrifying.”

“Yeah. More than,” she says, and shivers with emotion that is huge and wordless and buzzing in her spine and billowing inside her ribs. She feels ragged and winded with it. Twenty years, she thinks, and can’t fathom it. Dembe, Kate, Albert who is long gone, Sam from before the fall and he’s been gone, too, from both of them. She stops counting, having run out of names, is staggered by the expansive aloneness of it, and also how deeply familiar it feels to the shape of her own life. “God, Red. How do you survive like that, with so few— without…?” She can’t find words that don’t seem cruel and she stumbles to a halt.

She feels so protective of him, as he lays warm and solid under her, holding her so tightly that she can feel each of his fingertips. She wishes that she could somehow rise up between him and all that loneliness, as if she could wrap him within herself to ward off his own past. As if she could carve away all those years that obviously hurt him, that anchor him in a no man’s land away from the human contact he so obviously welcomes and craves.

“Don’t make out like my life has been some kind of penitential misery,” he says, more defensive than dismissive, she thinks, “That’s not fair to either of us. I only mean that… that I am utterly lost when it comes to you. And I wish so desperately that I wasn't.”

She doesn't know what to say, her throat is all stopped up with emotion in any case. She reaches up instead, presses her lips to his jaw, and then again with a firmer kiss that is almost a bite, running her lips along his warm skin and faint stubble and feels him shudder and clench her closer. She feels weightless, giddy, her cheeks are burning hot and there’s a flutter in all her veins. 

She can’t quite believe what she’s doing but she feels like there’s a galvanic buzzing in her skin, drawing her to his. She slides her lips along the curve of his cheek, so gently, testing, drinks in the scent of sweet-salt-skin and the resinous brightness of his soap. She marvels his absolute startled stillness under her hands, her mouth. 

“Breathing would be good, Red,” she whispers against the small, artful concavity of the upper curve of his chin. He makes a soft noise of confusion or surprise and his shoulders relax under hands, he pants a little to catch up. 

She feels the puffs of his breath, feels dizzy, feels such a rush of heat that she goes entirely limp, her arms ceasing to hold her steady. Her lips catch against the corner of his mouth, almost unintentionally, and she pulls back after another not-quite-kiss, shocked and reeling. She looks at Red’s awestruck face and thinks how she wants to devour him him whole, swallow his heart to keep it safe and keep him with her always, thinks she still doesn’t know why she’s doing this now of all times, not sooner, not later, not some saner time than this. She thinks of how even this, his skin and hers, isn’t quite enough to soothe away the visceral pain of those months of estrangement which still lives inside her -- but maybe it could be, given time and repetition. 

He says her name like it’s a forestalling noise, a question, and says nothing else. But his hands lift and guide her as he sits forward and before she knows it he’s returning the favor, pressing the most delicate kisses to the corner of her jaw, cradling the back of her skull and she can’t stop shivering from the warmth of his breath on her skin. He pulls back just enough to kiss her mouth, so gently and with so much hesitance that it also feels to her like a question, one she tries her best to answer. 

He’s so tender with her, as if he’s trying not to startle her, drawing her along with fleeting touches. She’s not sure she’s ever been treated with so much gentleness and care, it makes her breath hitch, makes her feel choked with affection. But his kisses and half-kisses, his giving solidity underneath her, the the way neither of them seem willing to venture beyond the teasing and tentative, nor yet able to pull away for than moments at a time, the way Red watches her every reaction with such focus and wonder, all sink her into such an incandescent feeling that it seems almost like a dream.

She gets ahold of herself enough to realize she’s kneeling astride him, gripping fistfuls of his shirt and near to hyperventilating from wanting and base terror, not sure if kissing Red is the best discovery she’s made in years or the destruction of the only good thing in her life. She manages to relax her hands, get enough distance to see his face clearly. But the rumpled, flushed and heavy lidded look of him makes her weak. She dives back in, demanding to be kissed in earnest, a desperate sound lingering in her throat.

“Christ, Lizzie…” he murmurs, nearly against her.

She can’t quite tell if he means it with wonder or with alarm, but she can’t seem to open her eyes far enough to check. Her head feels heavy and stuporous and she shifts restlessly, trying to get closer. 

“This feels like a dumb thing… are we doing something stupid here?” she asks. Her voice sounds slurry and warm. She has to pause when his lips find the side of her neck, hot and slick.

“That’s likely true, yes,” he says, and pauses, she can feel him go entirely tense and still under her, “Do you want to stop?”

“God, no.”

She doesn’t want to stop, wants to keep kissing him forever so she never has to think again. She realizes that this is the first time in so very, horribly long that she’s reached for anyone, kissed them because she wanted to and no other reason, not because it will get her out of an awkward situation. It’s so different. Without that cold iron clench of reluctance and obligation in her chest she feels so light, like she’s about to float away.

He bites at her, a little nip under the corner of her jaw and her hips jerk, she goes hot and cold at once. She kneads at the back of his neck, his shoulders, trying to encourage him, presses kisses anywhere she can reach, the side of his head, the upper curve of his ear. He makes a low sound that she can feel more than hear, resonating in his chest, and comes back to her mouth, trying his teeth carefully along her lower lip. 

She can’t stand it, she pants helplessly and rubs herself against him with thoughtless insistence and he bucks up like reflex with a startled noise. It’s like years of buried tension have snapped all at once, she can’t process it, can only feel it, aroused and euphoric. She can’t remember ever reacting like this with anyone before, a few heated kisses and she’s aflame and whimpering rocking herself in earnest against him on a stranger’s couch. 

Red runs his fingertips slowly up and down her back, making her shudder with plucked nerves, before trying to still her with hands firm at her sides.

“Slowly,” he says, softly, soothing, “Easy… there’s no rush. First tastes are such a thing to savor, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” she says, but leans in again, trying to steal another kiss, speaks with her lips brushing his, thinks she’s going to get away way it, “But I want this, don’t you? I think this works for us.”

“I want you, too, more than I can…” he breaks off and sighs, kisses her furiously, as though he could stoke those unarticulated thoughts inside her head with the force of it, and pulls back before she can respond, “But if a first taste is all… Please, Elizabeth, let me savor it.”

It’s a sweet thing to say, she thinks, and for a second she feels treasured, but then the implication registers. She goes still, suddenly cold and leaden again, every limb going heavy and slack, loosing her hold on him. She feels it as a brutal shock, as if she has been drawn unwillingly from the forge and plunged into a cool bath to set, every fiber coming to a standstill. Red is still right there, under her hands, between her legs, breathing her air, but she feels flung off, as distant as though there were miles between them.

“You don’t trust me,” she says, hollow voiced. She puts distance between their two faces for the first time in several minutes.

He looks so pained, agonized, and she’s not sure why, if it’s her accusation or her rejection, or they way she’s called attention to the truth and now he cannot lie. He’s never lied to her, and she’s sure that even for this he will not start. She lets her hands slide down from his shoulders and fold in her lap. She waits.

“I don’t trust the situation,” he says at last, “I want to tell you that I know everything that awaits us, I want to tell you that I have every step planned from here until you need no longer fear the law and the Cabal and that we will never be hurt or separated, or… And I don’t trust myself, to know how to be with you. I can’t bring you joy, Lizzie, I don’t think I know how, and I will never ask you to stand by me if I continue to use you so abysmally wrong.”

“It’s alright, you know,” she says, gently. She finds that she isn’t angry, just lost, just sad. She would push him or punish him for reminding her, only she desperately, desperately doesn’t want to see him hurt. She can’t stand to see him hurting, and it would be so much worse to know that she’d been the one to do it, even accidentally. “I don’t trust me, either. It’s like I don’t know myself anymore. I don’t ever seem to know if what I want is what I really want, or if it’s just an illusion. I mean, I thought I wanted, with Tom, I really did think I wanted… but I didn’t, I was wrong. So I really do understand if you don’t trust me. And I’m sorry for bringing him up at a time like this—”

“I don’t want you to apologize for— Do you think I’m jealous, that I see him as a rival? That man, Tom Keen, Jacob Phelps, whoever he is, he hurt you very badly, but was also a huge part of your life for the last four years. I don’t want you to think that there is any part of your life that is off limits to talk about with me,” he cut in, “What was it you said earlier? You want it to be easier to just say things? That goes for both of us, Elizabeth.”

He sighed again, with a look of regret she knew well. He reached up an unsteady hand to stroke her cheek and she leaned into his hand, needing the simple comfort before he pulled away again.

“In all honestly, I wouldn’t mind. If you wanted only to use me for comfort or for sex, I would give myself to you gladly, with no reservation, and I would value every minute of it. All of our time together is precious to me, even when you’re furious with me, even when you can’t stand the sight of me,” he says, and smiles with warm self-deprecation.

She’s sure it’s true. She knows he will take her in any state and treasure her, he’s shown it over and over. But as she looks into his clear green eyes, as he watches her with such warmth and sadness and resignation, she has to come face to face with something she’d been ignoring for months. Red is in love with her, loves her so much that it feels foreign and impossible, she can’t comprehend it at all. 

And she knows that to leap at him in this state, to use him as he suggests when she can’t even tell which impulses are inborn and which are phantasmic, would be a cruelty beyond her, no matter how euphoric it had felt mere minutes ago. More than likely he would enjoy it, savor every scrap she saw fit to send his way, but she wouldn’t be able to live with herself.

“I don’t want that for us,” she says, desperate and frustrated. She struggles to her feet, legs stiff from her kneeling position, and sits beside him, knees tucked up under her chin. “I don’t want to use you. I’ve had that from both sides and it’s _awful_. Sometimes I think that’s all I’ve ever had. Francis wanted constant flattery, Nick wanted convenience and Tom wanted… mostly someone to kick around, I guess, in the end. I’m done with it.”

“What do you want then, if I may ask,” he says, and shifts to face her directly, face taut with intent.

 _“I don’t know,”_ she says, almost a wail, “If I did, we wouldn’t even be _having_ this conversation.”

“I’m sorry. Of course that’s-- How could you know, in the middle of all this?” he says, his gaze dropping, “I understand, Lizzie.”

She wants to snap at him to stop apologizing, that it’s not his fault, that she’s just trying to protect him. She can’t find the words. 

“You’re my very favorite person, you know, Red,” she says instead, “and you don’t deserve even half of what I put you through.”

 

Red seems at a loss for what to do next. He sits still and drained next to her for a quiet while. Eventually he levers himself up to stand.

“Come on, Lizzie,” he says, holding out a hand to help her up, “Let me put away the records and I’ll walk you to your room.”

**

It’s an awkward silence that surrounds them, but he’s true to his word. They pass through the long, dark halls of the penthouse and the dim sitting room of their suite to stand by her darkened doorway. He fidgets like a chivalrous young suitor, waiting for her parting shot. He shows no sign at all of trying to wheedle his way across the threshold and she feels another vicious stab of affection for him.

She surprises them both by wrapping him up in a tight hug, but it’s familiar ground and he responds easily. She’s far more aware than she’s ever been of the heat of his palms against her back, but she ignores it.

“Are you disappointed?” she asks in a small whisper.

“I can’t say that I’m not,” he says, “but I’m also proud of you. And there is time, my love, for all of it to come clear. I’m doing everything I can to buy us that time.” He pulls back to kiss her cheek and smile down at her with wry humor, “And you know that positively my greatest skill is buying things.”

She giggled and swatted lightly at his arm, thinking of a few memorable interviews supposedly about blacklisters conducted at his tailors. “That’s true. That, and driving venerable artisans to the breaking point by changing your mind about pocket flaps a dozen times in an hour.”

“That, too.” He nodded with an ironic decisiveness and relaxed, growing serious. “Just think, Lizzie, by this time tomorrow, we’ll be in Europe. We can’t stay and play tourist in one place for long, of course, but there are many contacts to meet, plenty of chances to stop and look around.”

“And I’ll go with you to all those meetings, right?” she prompts.

“Of course. These will all be people you should know.”

“Good,” she says, with finality. She leans over and gives him a last, chaste kiss and steps out of his arms. 

She shuts herself into her room, leaving herself alone in the silent dark. At least the winter storm has long blown over. She sighs and wishes she hadn’t had an attack of conscience, that she wasn’t about to curl up on her own in her cold bed. She wishes she hadn’t accidentally driven herself even farther away from Red, made them both skittish and regretful.

They’re going to be so horribly aware of each other now, she thinks, and they’re going to be on the road again, alone and in close company. It’s overwhelming.


	8. eight (aether)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the departure.

The next day is clear and blinding-bright. The roads are cleared in a timely fashion, Moss’s pilot is rested and ready to go. There is no more reason to delay.

She had slept late, exhausted by the day before, and granted the boon sometimes given to sufferers of nightmares, the sleep after the most excoriating of dreams is often the most dead calm and blank from exhaustion. She had risen and dressed in comfortable things, the last clean outfit from her bag, had packed up, straightened her borrowed room. She had found when she emerged to their sitting room that Red had also risen late, and was still puttering with his things in a checkout routine she had learned so well in only the week of travel since North Carolina.

Only two weeks gone from home, she’d thought, but as irretrievably distant as though she made a mythic hero’s twenty year journey. It’s a thing she realizes and rediscovers a hundred times, a thousand times, knows she will go on doing so. She had supposed, as she’d looked out at the steep, unforgiving and snow spangled vista beyond their window, that her present circumstances were all beginning to feel more real, like a new house or a new habit becoming familiar, it took at last less effort to perceive. 

She and Red exchanged few words over breakfast, but his mood was bright and undaunted. Even though she still brined in regret over the night before, her guilt was eased to see it. To embark with a dour Red on this of all days would have been too much to bear, she was sure of it.

Moss was oblivious to any undercurrents, or perhaps assumed them to be a normal level of tension between his guests and left it unacknowledged. He fed them well, saw to their needs, gave them thick goose-down parkas from the resort gift shop when he realized that they had only their springtime gear to wear to the airstrip. He played the host with verve and courtesy, shepherding the three of them through their departure as though it were nothing more than an exciting day trip. He had his driver take them from the Lodge to the airstrip, so she and Red would see no more of the faithful vehicle that had taken them all the way from North Carolina. 

It was warming quickly after the snows and storms. Clots of slush fell from the evergreens around them as they drove through the deep woods. She soaks up the sight of it, the rough grandeur of the Tetons and the gleam and sparkle of fading snow. She knows that winter’s last gasps would be long over in the heart of Europe and she knows she might never see these mountains again. She savours the presence of these monumental beasts of mountains breaking through the plains land which seemed to her peculiarly American, singularly of her homeland — as strange as it was to think, these days, knowing her blood was born Russian. These cragged regions of grain and tree and sharp mountain and sweeping plateau still were more completely her homeland than anywhere in the world, as much as she’d tried to fight it.

She’d moved to the city by her and Sam’s home suburb, and then to the great City, which was the heart of the country, and then to the Capital, which had seemed both its nervous system and its cesspool. She had becoming a city dweller there, had her education and built her career, grew her hardened veneer. She had thought she’d shed her beginnings and her beginning-agains entirely. But now, in the end, seeing again what she supposed she’s still, after everything thought of as the heartland, it was both a joy and a heart-plucking wrench. And now it’s from this place that she will leave her native land, perhaps forever, as it seems her own parents had done long ago, fleeing to safety from the demanding and unnourishing bosom of Mother Russia. She leaves now from near to her once-home, into the wide open but ever forward-moving future of her never-quite-home, wherever it may be for the moment. 

She wonders if Red had planned it this way from the start, to give her this last passing glimpse. She wonders if Red understands that now her home is wherever she may stand by him, wherever she may hear his voice, and if she will ever find a way to tell him so in a way he will hear and understand. She wonders how she will fare; she wonders if, with time and practice, her feet may learn to stop trying to grow roots the way they do now despite her best intentions.

Moss’s plane is large; larger than the one Red had used before its existence on FBI record necessitated its sale. She thinks it looks seaworthy, or airworthy rather, big and sleek enough to get them safely over the Atlantic. Red makes some sotto voce remarks to her about “showing off,” and “crass ostentation,” and “trying to land something that size on a covert airstrip would be like trying to fit a yacht up to a dock meant for a rowboat,” but she can tell he’s pleased to be flying in style. 

“I’m sure you could buy ten of these, anyway,” she reassures him quietly as Calhoun goes to talk with the pilot, “Without your bank accounts even getting winded. You just have enough taste not to.”

He hums an agreement and cuts her a sly glance, “I don’t expect you to begin to flatter me, you know. No matter what may or may not happen for us, I don’t expect you to play the role. You know the role I mean.”

“No spurious compliments and fetching your slippers for me, you mean? How gracious of you,” she says, smirking.

“Just so,” he says, “And besides, I’ve always found your… bracing manner towards me quite refreshing.”

**

Calhoun shows her briefly around the jet. It’s another construct of beige leather upholstery, gleaming walnut and brass trimmings, the way Red’s plane was. There’s a small sleeping berth and a slightly larger bathroom, but it’s a rich man’s private jet, plush yet inevitably still slightly cramped. It’s not a revolutionary change from the one she’s ridden in many times before.

Red is to the fore of the plane making a last barrage of calls before they settle in for take off, checking in with Dembe back in the DC area, with Kate, with a couple of trusted European agents who are busy making arrangements for their arrival. She is left sitting alone with Calhoun for the moment, smiles politely and hopes she doesn’t have to make small talk. She doesn’t think she remembers how.

“You’re not quite what I expected,” says Calhoun, but she doesn’t know him well enough to know if there is judgement implied.

“Oh?”

“I’ve known Red a number of years now, seeing as how we work the same business. He and I both make connections between people who have things they want taken off their hands and people who are looking to acquire. And of course sometimes he’s looking to buy or sell, or I am. We help each other out. In the course of our friendship, I’ve met some of his associates, and some of his projects, you know, people he’s trying to help out or people he’s trying to set on a different track,” he tells her, casual and contemplative, and she can’t quite see where this is going, “And I have to say, I don’t think you fit in any of those categories.”

“I’m nobody’s project, Mr. Moss, I agree with you there,” she says, with more bite than she entirely intends. 

“That’s just what I mean, right there,” he says with a nod. “I was all set to be concerned about the young woman Raymond had brought under his spell and dragged in his wake. In fact, before I met you, I had planned on trying to convince you to part ways from him, leave the running to the criminals, that it only confirmed your guilt. I was all set to try and convince you to stay in the country and to offer you the services of the best lawyers that money can buy. I had my retainers on standby. It would have been a coup for me, Elizabeth, billionaire philanthropist champions woman wrongly accused of terrorism. Just think of the headlines.”

“I would have turned you down,” she says coldly, glancing away from Calhoun to try and catch Red’s eye, mentally urging him to wrap up his calls.

“Yes, I’m sure you would. I can see now you’re not quite as harmless as you look.”

“So you think I really am a terrorist, that’s what you’re saying?” she says, angry and confused and feeling attacked, “Are you going to turn us in now? Is this a warning?”

“No, of course not. Calm yourself, Raymond is a friend, and I hope I can say the same about you. Do I think you would hurt all those innocent people? No I don’t. I don’t think Raymond would be so quick to help you out if you had, for one,” Calhoun says, waving aside her outrage. “I’m relieved, is all. Raymond plays in the big leagues, he needs someone who can keep up with him. I didn’t want to think I was going to be complicit in dragging some poor young thing into his world to watch her get crushed, if I couldn’t convince you to stand and fight. But I see now you can hold your own. And that maybe you have your reasons for running after all.”

“I’m not sure what you’re implying, Mr. Moss,” she says crisply, “But I’m not sure I like it.”

“I’m not trying to offend you, Elizabeth. It’s a compliment, believe me. There are more than enough poor lost lambs in this world of ours, and you’re lucky not to be among them,” says Calhoun. He sits back in his lounge seat and levels an assessing look from canny eyes in her direction. “My father collected antiques, fussy, heavy gothic things mostly. Hideous, really, I never understood his taste, but the lessons he taught me about buying and selling have served me well. One of the things he taught me was never break up a set. And you and Raymond? As far as I can tell, you’re a set.”

She stares at Calhoun, stumped completely as for what to answer him. Her first reaction is to deny, to defer, and yet, now, after last night and all that had come before it, such protestations would be a lie — and perhaps even unfair to Red and herself. She can’t say, either, that she is truly an innocent lamb, nor did she really wish to be. Calhoun was right, their world was no place for bewildered naiveté, and she really is no poster child for the kind of cause he’d intended to head on her behalf. She suffers in silent confusion, proud and insulted and surprised that this near stranger had seen through her, had seen through them both after only two days.

Red comes over to join them at last, tucking his phone away. She reads the question in his face but shakes her head, not sure what to say to him either.

“Cal, what _have_ you two been talking about? I recognize the expression on Elizabeth’s face and I would say it bodes ill for you, my friend,” Red says, and there’s just a hint of threat under his casual gregarity. She understands that he doesn’t mean it as a slight to her and her temper but as a gentle warning to Calhoun.

In spite of social conditioning that tells her to spurn such posturing, she can’t help but settle back and smile to herself. She is able, more than able, to stand on her own and fight her way through, has built her career doing just that. But it’s such a sweet and novel feeling to have someone so willing to lend his defense without expecting her obedience and gratitude in return. It’s taken her months and months to realize this about Red, and it still takes her by surprise.

“Nothing important,” she tells him, “How are things on the home front?”

“Dembe’s well, he’s got things in hand on the business end. Donald and the gang are chasing shadows at the moment, though chasing them with great fervor and dedication, as usual. Kate has tabs on a few key players for me. And I have it on good authority,” he says with a gleam of triumph in his eyes, “That Newsnight on ACN is going to be kicking off the week with a very special, very damning special show about our good friend CIA Director Peter Kostiopoulos’s past exploits.”

“Not Tom Connelly?” she asks, torn between hope rising like a flock of birds from a pond, suddenly, sweetly and with a great racket in her, and disappointment that the world still won’t and might never know the truth of the man she killed.

“Would you go after the live prey or the man who had already been dethroned and buried? No, this is a good thing, Lizzie. The Director is a man with a lot of power and the public outcry against him will be much more immediate and fueled by far more self interest, as he is still around to wield it.”

“I guess that makes sense,” she concedes, and sees the grim self-satisfaction proud on his face as he settles into the seat next to her. “You obviously pointed them in this direction, so I’m sure you know what you’re doing… Wait,” she stops, realizing the implications, “Does this mean you know Will McAvoy? _The_ Will McAvoy I used to watch every evening I was home for the news, and you didn’t tell me? Seriously?”

“No, not to speak of, but Charlie Skinner is a man who knows how to treat a confidential source. He’s also a man who can drink me under the table, which, as you may know, is a rare feat,” he says with a reminiscing smile, “In any event, it’s the start of the next phase, Lizzie. The news will begin to break in two days time, and we can watch it from the relative safety of the Continent. The entire playing field is about to change.”

There’s a confidence in his voice that she hasn’t heard in months, and a straightness to his frame beside her. She’s amazed what a difference it makes, knowing that Red now thinks they have a chance. She can’t see it, she doesn’t yet know how to predict the actions and reactions of their enemies and all the players on the ground. She herself isn’t sure, can picture none of it, but seeing that he can, knowing he has played these forces off of each other with skill for well more than a decade, it reassures her. For the first time since they had left the District in that rattling van, she begins in earnest to hope.

She is lost for words, feeling dumbfounded in the face of the sudden widening of their horizons. She forgets that Calhoun still sits with them, his presence fading into the background behind the white noise of her startled joy. She stares at Red, mute and overwhelmed, watches how he smiles at her so fondly as if to say ‘see, I told you, Lizzie.’ She fumbles her hand into his instead, pressing her palm to his and squeezing tight. 

**

Moss had left to give the pilot permission to depart, and had settled himself several seats away when he’d come back to the main cabin, so she and Red had privacy to talk. But she wasn’t entirely sure what there was to say. She had shared so much the day before, secret things of herself that she had never entirely meant to share with anyone, the things she had much rather erase from her past entirely and the things she was sure she should know better than to want. There settled now in her the ringing quietude of having shared them and the uncertainty of the aftermath, whether she could adjust to the feeling of Red looking at her and knowing these things.

But he always had known the worst of her, the blood on her hands and the brutality of her beginnings, had known even when she had not. It hadn’t stopped him from guarding her from the shadows all those years, it hadn’t stopped him from risking his life and his business to try and stand between her and the strange and dangerous influences of her husband, Berlin, the Cabal and their interest in the Fulcrum. Had done nothing to ward off the love that she had seen slowly bloom in his eyes.

If her own father’s blood on her hands, as monstrous and unsettling as that thought was, hadn’t been enough to earn his disgust, then she supposed that the little discretions like using Tom to punish herself would hardly make a difference to him in the long run. She would get used to him knowing, in time. She would get used to having finally acknowledged these things to herself, as well.

Even stranger to her was their evening on couch, the records and the dim light and how boldly they had both spoken to each other. She didn’t entirely believe it had happened, that it could have, after two years of trying so hard to never say, never admit, never look at each other as simply a man and a woman locked together in the most complicated but the most age old of dances. In some ways it was embarrassing, it was such a terrible cliche. To have it turn out that they were only two ordinary people after all, who had done something so primal and unnuanced as to fall to wanting each other. That all it had taken were the exchange of a few warm touches and a few sweet kisses with Red, and she had gone up in flame all at once, like dry grass. 

But it was such a relief, too, to bring it all out into the open at last. This is the world where we met, this is the world I think about, he had said, even though it was the same world that had scarred him and deprived him and kept him wandering in the shadows all these years, even though she understood more and more that he truly preferred the smaller, homier comforts so often denied him. And she had admitted aloud that she’d begun to wish that they could have simply met, simply let him sweep her off her feet. That any old ordinary life with him seemed the sweetest thing to her. They had said these things and the sky hadn’t fallen, the hounds of the hunt hadn’t come baying at the door. What they felt for each other had proved not to be imminent catastrophe after all, nothing at all like the fatal gale she had feared, but something much quieter and much more warm, like an open hand extended in promise.

It was a relief, too, to know she could desire a man who didn’t mean to tear her into pieces and use them to further his quest. For a while there, for far too long she had been sure that was all she was fit for, all she ever seemed destined to want. She had been so sure, for a time, that she had decided the same was true of Red, and he’d made it so easy… but he had agreed to try, had made it clear that he meant to do better. 

She had begun to realize, too, that the fantasy of after, of some settled future after Red and his List and his interference, with a house and a child and a dog, had faded. She didn’t cling to that faded scrap of fancy to keep herself moving forward, not anymore. The thought of a time after Red, no matter how pastoral or pleasant, alarmed her rather than entired. She knew with needle-sharp certainty that she didn’t ever want to be done with him, or for them to be done with each other. Whether she could love him or not, whether Red could learn to be present and unhesitating with her or not, she knew that she meant to built a life with him, wherever that might lead.

And the one thing she hadn’t told him, the truth of that day she had faced off against Tom Connelly and taken him down, that could wait. She was sure it could. It could wait a long, long time, until after Red had realized that she would sacrifice for him, that she would protect him with everything she had, and there was nothing he could do about it. Surely he knew enough to guess, enough to put it together if he really wanted to. There would be time enough later to say the words, if he really wanted them said.

The engine noise is slowly building around them in the plane’s cabin, and the day beyond the little windows was brilliant and white with snow and sun, so much so that it dazzles her eyes as she tries to look her fill of her home country, take her parting glance. She looks away, blinking away the spangles in her eyes but not tears. 

She’s not sure when she’ll be back, but for the first time she’s sure she will be, eventually, and perhaps not entirely in disgrace. She buckles herself in and leans back against the plush seat.

“You’re very quiet,” says Red, turning to look at her and reclaiming her hand, “Did Calhoun say something to upset you?”

“No, not upsetting. Kind of weird though. He said he’d planned on trying to rescue me from your clutches, until he realized I didn’t need rescuing,” she says and beams at him, feeling like a partner in crime, like a couple of troublemaking kids hiding out together at the back of the bus.

“Hmm. I’m not sure whether to feel flattered or insulted,” he says, but he smiles gently just the same, his eyes soft and warm. His expression makes her think of the night before, the intimacy of it makes her remember, for a vivid second, the feel of his hands clutching her, how good it had been to sit astride him, and she flushes hot.

“He’s right though, I don’t need rescuing from you,” she says and raises their clasped hands, presses a firm kiss to his knuckles in place of the things she can’t quite say — and wouldn’t anyhow, unless they were alone, no matter how studiously Moss sits and reads his paper at his end of the cabin.

When she meets Red’s eyes again her furious blush has faded to a warm glow that beats steadily inside her. He’s leaned close, inches away, studying her with this look, so hungry and so full of wonder. His thumb gently strokes at the base of hers. The plane begins to taxi, gaining speed, she feels the swoop of it deep in her body, doubling and redoubling. 

“Nervous?” he asks, almost a whisper, gaze steady on hers.

She shakes her head just slightly, and leans in even closer. She feels her heart beating fast and hard, but she isn’t scared, not now. She lets him thread his fingers between hers and shivers in delight.

Before she knows it, they’re in the air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for following me and Red and Liz on this journey. I am sad to see this story go, but a sequel of very much equal length and depth is on it's way. I hope you will all tell me what you think, now that you can see this tale in it's entirety. I hope also that this first arc of Liz's new life feels as real and complete to you as it does to me. 
> 
> The title of this fic comes from an Iron & Wine song, Evening On the Ground.
> 
> _"And you can blame me_   
>  _Blame me, I will wear it_   
>  _In the empty, hollow part of my garden_   
>  _Garden wall of Eden_   
>  _And the clamor as they raise the curtain"_
> 
> This chapter contains a loving and brief reference to Aaron Sorkin's show The Newsroom.
> 
> Here endeth Stave One of _Yearlong_. (Yearlong: adj. "lasting for a year" adj. "enduring, perpetual, age-long")


End file.
